Proposed Amendments to Bylaws, BOTMDG, 2021
A committee of Bill Baus, Cathy Meyer, Kyla Wargel, and Marie Deer looked over our group’s bylaws, which had not been updated since 2006. The full board then reviewed the committee’s proposals. The changes, edits, and amendments are highlighted in yellow. We will be asking you, the membership of BOTMDG, to vote yes or no on this new set of amended bylaws at the annual general meeting on Wednesday, January 20, 2021.
Please feel free to compare this version of the bylaws, including the proposed amendments, with the current version.
Here are our reasons for the various proposed changes:
Article 2, paragraph 1: comma added after “song” for clarity.
Article 2, paragraph 2: slight rewrite of final section of sentence because we are no longer using an actual wholesale section from current wording of the Country Dance and Song Society in our purpose section at the end (see notes there); we are simply following objectives that they have promoted in the past.
Article 4, subsection b, line 1: “his or her” changed to “their” for greater inclusivity.
Article 4, subsection c, line 1: “three weeks notice” edited to “three weeks’ notice” for grammatical accuracy.
Article 5. Please note that adding some at-large members and potentially expanding the board a little was a primary impetus for our new look at the bylaws.
subsection a: the number of board coordinators would change from 8 to up to 12.
a.iii.: we propose specifying the newsletter and website as responsibilities of the communications coordinator, but taking away responsibility for the orange sheet (see iv just below)
a.iv.: these changes add a new position called membership coordinator, with the duties shown here – this is a large job that didn’t have a particular board position in charge of it and we are excited for the possibility of somebody also being in charge of membership outreach.
a.v.: we did not previously have someone just in charge of the booking; the main dance coordinator has been doing this for years. We wanted this to be a clearly specified position.
a.vi.: there were previously three dance coordinators but some parts of the bylaws implied a hierarchy among them and other parts implied that they were all equal; we would be making this two dance setup board positions now (in addition to the separate booking position), in the knowledge that dance setup is a big and important job, and with the expectation that the membership will be recruited to help with what needs to be done.
a.viii. we did not previously have at-large members; the thought and hope is that this will be a way for people to ease onto the board, for new faces to join the board, for there to be greater diversity in our decision-making group, greater flexibility in who does what, and a few more hands to help.
Article 6, subsection f: we are just specifying here in plainer language what was previously implied. The costs of dance weekends and facility rentals regularly exceed $1000.
Article 6, subsections g and h: there was nothing at all in the bylaws about quorums or votes of the Board, so we added these sections.
Article 7, subsection a: we added the second sentence for clarity because the one-year term of office was not otherwise specified in the bylaws.
Article 7, subsection e:
– We would like to change “paper ballots” to “ballots” because this pandemic has shown us that there might be times when it is tricky to make paper ballots work.
– “In the case of uncontested races, voice voting may be used.” This is a matter of putting into the bylaws what the practice of the board has already been for a long time.
Final Addendum:
– the heading of this used to refer to the Country Dance and Song Society (CDSS), but that no longer applies
– in the first two lines of this section, we now simply acknowledge that the wording originally came from CDSS
– in the final lines of this addendum, we are deleting the legal wording that was relevant to CDSS at one point. It does not apply to us.
