Valid call out. My eyes have been more focused on the dates themselves, with this one having a more narrow application.
@Anastasia Wilford since you brought forward the motion on behalf of the group, is there a reason this was determined to be a rule change, as opposed to an exception, as we saw under Jacob's motion? This inquiry ignores what I considered a valid concern raised by Mr. Russell on the two dates. I saw Mr. Talley's remarks, but did not want to assume they explained the group's rationale.
For what it's worth, this is a change to policy, and not our rules/bylaws which, while it may seem pedantic, our policy manual is the lesser document to our rules (as they're called in election code)/bylaws with easier means of amendment, and deference to our actual bylaws.
As to changing the policy itself, I was inspired to amend the policy after several bits of discussion from Jacob's original thread on the matter and one on one conversations around the matter. Those conversations touched on several of the shortcomings of the policy as it currently stands, namely, that if a person were to file an application at the beginning of December, they would be expected to wait until mid-April, nearly 5 month, before they would be able to affiliate their county while both our affiliate team and cred comms felt like they would bring on new counties as late as mid-February without hindering their performance.
Now, I have a robust familiarity with the affiliation process. I have been with it through every iteration since it moved beyond a simple appointment by the state chair. It used to be the case that all three interviews were conducted separately (tastes of the people doing the interviews at the time lent them to want to have one on one conversations instead of panels interviews), in addition to being required to have a preliminary interview with the county coordinator and a final interview with the chair. We have significantly streamlined that process now and taken something that frequently took nearly to coordinate between multiple people's schedules, and now when everyone is on their game, it can take just a couple weeks from application to appointment.
And from there, I know a couple people have contended, given that Donley county was recently found to hold views that don't align with the things LPTexas wants to be associated with, that a quick process isn't necessarily the right process. However, what I would contend in response is that SLEC doesn't see the applicants who never get through the application process. And maybe that's something that could be reported to SLEC in the future. But there are plenty of people who apply who don't make it through the process for one reason of another. The fact that one (or 2 ish if you consider the other one Kyle brought up at the beginning of the term that seems to have gotten her act together since then) got through doesn't mean we need to lock the process down even more. Vetting is happening. Let's talk about it later, but we don't need to further hamper ourselves over a mistake that our Affiliate team took prompt action on to resolve once it was brought to their attention. Those are two separate issues that need to be addressed separately.
Finally, when collaborating with John and Jessi as the present members of the policy committee at our working meeting Thursday, I presented a motion to strike this section entirely because I felt like the cred comm and affiliate support department could set those deadlines themselves without the need of a policy and therefore they could be flexible for each term as needed. However, John and Jessi both felt like the deadlines were necessary and that we needed one for submitting applications and one for actually establishing counties. By the end of our call, we felt like this language was clearer than what we currently have, and gave more flexibility to teams moving forward without making their unnecessarily jobs harder.
