Request for co-sponsors: Motion to renumber and make minor changes to LPTexas' Policy Manual

A

Anastasia Wilford

SLEC Member
One of the last items that the Policy Committee of last term intended to ask SLEC to take up was renumbering the Policy Manual. I had prepared that motion for the committee to consider, but it was late in the term and we were all wrapped up in convention prep by that time.

With that in mind, I'm requesting co-sponsors for a motion to adopt the changes reflected in the attached document. It not only includes renumbering, but a few reference updates as well as amendments to reflect the new SLEC structure. Everything is highlighted so should be easy to review. I'll be happy to answer questions if anyone has them.
 

Attachments

Anastasia, I thought we took care of this many years ago when the convention body decided to make numbering and spelling issues, etc. to be things that the staff could correct without any motions. My memory is terrible about things like this. If not, I think we need an amendment to your motion that allows staff to handle these types of things as long as they do not change the essence of what is established in the document. Your thoughts?
 
Jack Westbrook said:
Anastasia, I thought we took care of this many years ago when the convention body decided to make numbering and spelling issues, etc. to be things that the staff could correct without any motions. My memory is terrible about things like this. If not, I think we need an amendment to your motion that allows staff to handle these types of things as long as they do not change the essence of what is established in the document. Your thoughts?
Click to expand...
This is what the Policy Manual currently says on the matter.
1777059903879.webp


Since the Policy Committee is automatically dissolved at the close of convention, we don't have one that could do the renumbering portion right now. And since there are a few other minor changes (updating SLEC residency and county chair interviews to reflect the new SLEC changes), I figured we could just get them all done in one fell swoop if the body is amenable.
 
I've included changes in here for that. Basically I removed any references to districts and changed it to "region" instead,with the intent that region can be whatever geographic area you were elected from.

This way, if we ever restructure SLEC again, this policy should be able to persist. Right now the region we have to hold residency in is the state of Texas. Maybe in the future it's SBOE districts or Senate Districts, but they will still be the region you were elected from.
 
Thanks for pulling the proposal together. I am in agreement with most of it, but I have one reservation. I understand the desire to be able to include certain chairs on the interviews that may not have been elected at a county convention; however, I believe there should be some seasoning criteria. If a county chair has been recently approved under the provisional affiliation process and has little experience, I don’t feel that chair should be eligible to serve on an interview team for another provisional county chair. It seems to me there are a sufficient number of folks to choose from who are county chairs that have experience with the party.
 
I understand the sentiment that chairs with experience are preferred, and you're right that there are plenty of people to choose from to use for interviews, but the provision of having been elected at county convention doesn't solve the problem that it intends to solve.

We have several people elected to county chair at convention who have never been a chair before or who have never been in county leadership.

If the goal is not to have inexperienced people on interview panels, I think we can discuss that, but this provision doesn't serve that purpose.
 
There has been at least one example of a chair that was approved in recent times that was rushed into the position without thorough vetting. Under this change, that individual could have been added to a County Chair interview team before his flaws were discovered. I agree that election at a county convention doesn’t solve much, but I am not in favor of relaxing the interview team composition without putting in other safeguards. Let’s improve the process but adding a seasoning or experience level limitation. If there is a provisionally affiliated county chair who has other demonstrated experience in the party I would favor allowing them to serve on an interview team.
 
What I would recommend if we were going to attempt some sort of seasoning requirement is that we not allow provisional county chairs to be on interview panels. I think that would meet your concerns more than the clause as it currently exists.
 
Anastasia Wilford said:
What I would recommend if we were going to attempt some sort of seasoning requirement is that we not allow provisional county chairs to be on interview panels. I think that would meet your concerns more than the clause as it currently exists.
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I agree, I think just not having provisional chairs on panels would be the simplest solution. Also our interview panels are put together by staff directors right? Slec has discussed trusting the staff we put in place and letting them do their job and this applies here as well.
 
Anastasia Wilford said:
I've included changes in here for that. Basically I removed any references to districts and changed it to "region" instead,with the intent that region can be whatever geographic area you were elected from.

This way, if we ever restructure SLEC again, this policy should be able to persist. Right now the region we have to hold residency in is the state of Texas. Maybe in the future it's SBOE districts or Senate Districts, but they will still be the region you were elected from.
Click to expand...
That is what I was referencing; that solutions works and explains your intent.
 
Quick interruption here:

I wasn't that concerned about the old 10% rule for co-sponsors, but didn't oppose the 20% rule either. But now we need 2x more sponsors by percentage against ~4x less members, which sort of circles back to about the same amount of people paying attention to get things moving.

That said, I was sympathetic to the reasoning behind the 20% change, as I understood it. (This despite the fact that last term I just figured that if you're not paying attention to the discussion forum that's a skill issue.) If the point is to be sure enough people on the body understand the motion and debate is more or less complete, then we can make that a fuzzy rule (which is why so far I've been holding off here on setting up a vote).

But I really would like to see this smaller body be more agile and more aggressive in getting stuff done, so maybe the fact that 4 people now represents 20% of the body is enough warrant to go ahead and launch a vote.

Side note to the interruption: I'm a drummer, among other things, and 'keeping tempo' is a big deal for me. I'd like us to have a regular rhythm on these online votes, so maybe this isn't a quick interruption after all. More of a 'point of order', maybe, that deserves a little further unpacking.

<time passes...>

Okay, I've thought this through. Going forward, if we have four sponsors then I'm going to proceed to a vote, unless the maker of the motion asks me to hold up because of a discussion that's in progress (which I hope will be used sparingly). Our practice is to post a notice in the #slec thread on Discord (which is in addition to the automatic #slec-forum thread postings), so between that and forum notifications everybody should be paying attention.

This vote appears uncontroversial. Questions have been asked and answered to the satisfaction of the questioners. The remaining question re county chair interviews can be processed in a separate discussion around a separate motion; it doesn't need to hold up this particular motion. Let's get this done. (And David and Susan and anyone else, let's take care of the county chair interview question in a new thread.)
 
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