Mark your calendars to vote next Thursday, August 5

Hello, Friends.

I know there are reminders everywhere, but obviously it is very important that you remember to vote next Thursday, August 5th, for the four persons you deem best qualitifed to help lead NCRA into the future.

Obviously, I am calling for a change in thinking and a change in direction. And I'm hoping the members will tell the Board that they want a change as well by voting for me for Secretary-Treasurer.

Hopefully, you have all registered your email address with NCRA, but if you haven't you need to go to NCRAonline, making sure you can get into that site with your user name (membership number) and password, and then make sure your email is up to date on the site. Look at your settings to be sure. If you are receiving email from NCRA, you should be good.

Next, mark your calendar, by cell phone if possible, and make an appointment for yourself to vote online on August 5th, 2010.

Check your email on August 5th in the early afternoon and keep checking it, including your spam, until you see an email from NCRA which will give you the needed link to the voting website. You'll again have to have your log-in information available to you, so write that down and keep it handy as well. Know your NCRA membership number and your password.

If you have any problem, call headquarters at 1-800-272-6272 or email them at msic@ncrahq.org. Check to be sure you can get into the site before August 5th! There may also be a phoone number listed in the email NCRA sends you concerning voting if you need help. The voting will begin about two hours after the business meeting and then will remain open for 12 hours, so you can vote from home after work if you like.

I'm ready, willing and able to serve you, so please don't forget to vote!!

Thanks.

BAM

The Tweaking of the C&B

I don't know who writes this stuff, but sometimes I really do find it comical. I read with great interest the Board's assessment of the proposed bylaws amendments. It's funny how they say that they take no position with the substance of the proposed amendments and then proceed to say they cannot support them for all the following reasons. Isn't that like taking a position?

Speaking only about the Board's comments to the proposed amendment that I wrote and the rationale that I wrote as well, Article V, Section 2, the Board says the number of seven years is totally arbitrary on my part, which, of course, it isn't. First I looked at the fact that a director can serve a full three-year term, sit off for one year, and then run again and serve another full three-year term. In essence, just being arbitrary now with this picking of numbers, a qualified reporter could be a director for 12 out of 15 years. In choosing seven years for officer positions, I felt that if a person served as vice president and then succeeded in going through the chairs of president-elect, president and immediate past president, that would be four years, and then three more would be seven, so it would be seven years before that person could run for vice president again. I hardly consider that logic arbitrary. It ends up being three times more time that the person serving in the officer position would have to wait over what a person serving in a director position would have to wait.

Then they say that piecemealing the C&B is just not a good thing and perhaps the whole thing should be rewritten. I wonder what someone would say if it was suggested that we rewrite the U.S. Constitution? And, oh, by the way, weren't there a few amendments to that document?

And lastly, I have said here and elsewhere more than once, but do it again here, that if I win the election for secretary-treasurer, I will not try to move up the ladder again. I will try to stay on for three years in that spot and then retire from board service. So if anyone gets up and says this is all about Bruce Matthews wanting to be president again, well, I'm afraid it just won't be so.

BAM

Which is it?

Recently, the Deposition Reporters Association of California asked the reporters running for positions on the NCRA Board of Directors questions so that members could be informed of where these reporters stood with regard to the issues of the day.

The first question asked if the candidates believed NCRA should remain a steno organization or become an umbrella organization.

My opponent in the race for secretary-treasurer answered: "We should and will remain what the membership decides. I do not see and would not advocate bringing in audio recording operators into NCRA."

But earlier in a post on the NCRA Forum, he said, "I'm not in favor of supporting an ER/DAR operator push for membership -- again, lacking facts to sway me to the contrary."

So I guess my question is: Which is it? Are you against it or are you only against it until someone can convince you otherwise? Don't we have the right to have an organization that advocates for what we do? Don't we have the right to have an association that advocates only for stenographic reporters? Isn't that what our Constitution and Bylaws say we are all about? And haven't the members already told the board on three separate occasions that they want to remain steno only?

I am growing tired of hearing about what DAR can do. I already know what DAR can do. But I also know what we can do, and we ought to be talking about that. The president of NCRA just admitted that for the past couple years, the NCRA board was too engrossed in becoming an umbrella-type testing organization and an umbrella-type membership organization. And my opponent has been a member of that board for four out the the last five years. She said they are now going to listen to the membership to see what direction they want the association to go in. That's great! I do question the timing of it all, coming out one month before the convention with all of these contested elections taking place, but let's advocate for steno. Let's advocate to the public and our members for realtime. Let's do what we should have been doing for the last several years.

LISTEN TO THE MEMBERS!

I just received my June issue of the JCR, and as I usually do, I opened it to the President's Page to read what President Morgan had written. Much to my surprise, she wrote: "Almost two years ago, the NCRA Board of Directors attempted to launch a similar discussion, but, in the process, we were thinking too much about the future of the Association rather than on the furture of the profession. To frame the conversation, we focused too extensively on the potential inclusion of those using other methods of making the record within an 'umbrella-type' testing or membershiip scenario. To say the least, this was an approach that served no one well."

They have finally admitted what was going on. They were panicking about their numbers and felt they needed to bring in other people and money either by way of testing or by way of membership. The problem is the membership has been telling them for years, many more than two, that they want NCRA to remain a steno only organization. At the presidential planning meeting I attended earlier this year, SueLynn Morgan told me that NCRA could not afford to have another motion-to-rescind-type scenario happen again. She stopped short of what she is saying now, but it's obvious if the board would not have been looking to test or bring in other "methods," the motion to rescind would have never taken place.

So now, right before the convention, they come out and say, "We are now going to listen to the membership." Well, I say it's about time.