board77

APPROVED TEXT

(To be added to Article 4)

¶5 Grounds and Procedure for removing an Elected Official from office

The Mayor may have time periods when he/she cannot be on the board regularly, and may seek assistance from the Rangers by giving them advanced notice of the tasks that must be performed during that time period.

However, if the Rangers must use their administrative powers to enter the threads of Michel Delving or the Outside Forum on five separate occasions on an emergency basis because the Mayor, through negligence and without giving advance warning of his/her absence, has failed to do any of the following in timely fashion:
• schedule Ranger terms of office;
• advise Rangers of an expiring penalty in advance of its expiration;
• update the Jury Pool;
• resolve member objections so that a volunteer can enter the Ranger pool;
• send out eligibility notifications within two weeks of eligibility or member greetings within two weeks of activation;
• provide authorization for a member to represent the board in dealings with the public;
• convene any committee for which the Mayor is responsible;
• make the necessary announcements for elections;
the Rangers may convene a Hearing to remove the Mayor from office. A majority of current Rangers must agree that this is necessary.

The Rangers must convene a Hearing to remove the Mayor or any other elected official under the following circumstances:
• the elected official deserts the board and cannot be contacted for a period of 30 days;
• the elected official reveals private information obtained from members as a result of their office;
• the elected uses the board to boast about criminal behaviors and/or encourage other posters to engage in them.

(To be added to Article 5)

¶6: Hearings to Remove an Elected Official

A Mayor or other elected official cannot be removed from office for any offense not specified in Article 4, ¶5 of the by-laws.

Hearings to remove an elected official are convened by the agreement of a majority of current Rangers and conducted as described in ¶4, above. The duties and powers of the official are suspended and the official is restricted to the Jury Room for the duration of the hearing.

The deliberation of the Jury is to determine whether or not the official has violated the by-laws in a manner requiring their removal according to Article 4, ¶5, or displayed negligence (as described in that paragraph) of sufficient severity to justify removal, and to remove the elected official if such condition exists. The Jury may not issue warnings or impose partial penalties or place any other restrictions on the action of an elected official as an alternative to removing them from office.

Any Hearing to Remove an Elected Official will have a Loremaster in attendance.
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Original post:
While people are showing up to vote, I'll post this additional issue having to do with the Mayor.

We have to complete Article 5: Dispute Resolution, ¶7: Procedure for Hearings to Remove Elected Officials

(The only elected official so far is the Mayor, but we left room for the Mayor to request an assistant, so I would like to leave the title ‘generic’ just in case there is another elected official in the future.)

The closest paragraph to this one is ¶6: Procedure for Hearings to Remove a Ranger. Here is the text of that paragraph:

A Ranger cannot be removed from office for any offense not specified in Article 3 of the by-laws.

Hearings to remove a Ranger are convened and conducted in the same manner as Hearings on a Community Disruption except that Administrative powers are revoked and the member is restricted to the Jury Room for the duration of the hearing.

The deliberation of the Jury is to determine whether or not the offense in question has been committed, and to remove the Ranger if they decide that it has. The Jury may not issue warnings or impose partial penalties or place any other restrictions on the action of the Ranger as an alternative to removing them from office. The Ranger either stays in office with full powers or is removed with those penalties specified in Article 3 of the by-laws.

We were able to be short and sweet because we had already defined in Article 3 the Grounds and Procedure for removing Rangers. Please read through the text of Article 3: Rangers, scrolling down to ¶8, and inside ¶8 to Grounds for Removal of a Ranger.

For the sake of consistency, we need a paragraph in the Mayor’s article that corresponds to the Removal Paragraph for Rangers. Then the paragraph on Hearings to Remove an Elected Official can also parallel the paragraph on Hearings to Remove a Ranger.

So, before doing the paragraph on Hearings, I would like to focus on an additional paragraph for Article 4: The Mayor, which would cover Grounds for Removal, Procedure for Removal, and Penalty for Removal.

Grounds:
Some can be lifted right from the Ranger paragraph:

• Desertion: An elected official who deserts the board and cannot be contacted for a period of 30 days should be removed from office.
• An Immediate Hearing is required if an elected official:
1. reveals private information obtained as a result of their office;
2. uses the board to boast about criminal behaviors and/or encourage other posters to engage in them.

But for the Mayor, the big deal will be keeping up-to-date on records. Consequences of not doing this, in order of severity: penalties are not lifted on time, Rangers are not scheduled on time, a Hearing is delayed because the jury list is not up-to-date, elections do not take place on time because notification went out too late, members are not aware of their eligibilities and get passed over for entitlements.

Grounds are very important. Basically what a jury will decide in this kind of hearing will be whether the Mayor actually did things that constitute grounds, in which case the jury is forced to remove him/her from office.

For Rangers, we had Warnings -> Formal Complaints -> Removal. How would you like to handle this with the Mayor? How much dereliction of duty would be grounds for removal?

Procedure:
The first people to be aware of a Mayor’s dereliction would be the Rangers. So in this case I think it might be safe to say that although members can lodge complaints against the mayor by notifying the Rangers, a majority of Rangers must agree that grounds seem to exist for removing the Mayor, and they would then call the hearing.

Penalties:
My personal opinion is that someone removed from elected office should not serve elected office on the board again.

Part Two of this exercise: The paragraph on Hearings in Article 5 could read almost exactly like the paragraph for Ranger removal in Article 5.

Question 1: Do you want a six person jury to hear this kind of case, or should there be more?

Question 2: I would like to see written into this paragraph, and amended into the corresponding paragraph on Rangers the requirement that a Loremaster attend any Hearing for the removal of a Ranger or an Elected Official. The reason for this is to reduce the likelihood of grounds for appeal, since we did not exclude these kinds of hearings from being appealed.

Jn

don't all rush forward with ideas at once [sigh]

Allow me to propose one catch-all to add to the other blue text above:

The Mayor may have time periods when he/she cannot be on the board regularly, and may seek assistance from the Rangers by giving them advanced notice of the tasks that must be performed during that time period.

However, if the Rangers must use their administrative powers to enter the threads of Michel Delving or the Outside Forum on three separate occassions on an emergency basis because the Mayor, through negligence and without giving advance warning of his/her absence, has failed to do any of the following in timely fashion:
• schedule Ranger terms of office;
• advise Rangers of an expiring penalty in advance of its expiration;
• update the Jury Pool;
• resolve member objections so that a volunteer can enter the Ranger pool;
• send out eligibility notifications within two weeks of eligibility or member greetings within two weeks of activation;
• provide authorization for a member to represent the board in dealings with the public;
• convene any committee for which the Mayor is responsible;
• make the necessary announcements for elections;
the Rangers may convene a Hearing to remove the Mayor from office. A majority of current Rangers must agree that this is necessary.

I think that covers anything that would go seriously wrong if the Mayor takes a powder.

Jn

Sounds good; let's vote.

Ok - I've been working on something else, so let me come back to this after lunch and put together a draft ballot.

Meanwhile, is 3 derelictions of duty too few? What other choices would you like to see?

Jn

Hmmh, does that mean after three of these offenses of negligence the mayor might be removed without having had warnings first?

That's eight different tasks, and you can only fail three times - I think this sounds tough.

A Ranger needs 15 offenses before being removed, and they only serve three months.

I'm not quite sure about how bad such oversights are, and how often those duties have to be performed (the more often, the greater the chance to forget once).

Quote:

Question 1: Do you want a six person jury to hear this kind of case, or should there be more?

Question 2: I would like to see written into this paragraph, and amended into the corresponding paragraph on Rangers the requirement that a Loremaster attend any Hearing for the removal of a Ranger or an Elected Official. The reason for this is to reduce the likelihood of grounds for appeal, since we did not exclude these kinds of hearings from being appealed.

Yes to both.

I think three is fine. Mayors have a high standard to live up to.

I dunno... this does seem a little stringent.

I know we need to have guidelines to follow, but I would hate to make this so rigid that we wouldn't be able to bend a little depending upon circumstances.

What if all three derelictions happened as the result of one RL crisis? A mayor could easily have three of these things to do in one week, and sometimes stuff happens.

I can see how a family emergency could keep a Mayor away from the boards, easily through three "derelictions"; no notice given, no communication, really, because there is no time. RL happens.

On the other hand, what we want to avoid, I think, is a Mayor who habitually abandons their post.

I wonder how we could structure a guideline which would limit that?

Anth,

we went through this dilemma with Admin removal and came up against the 'buck stops here' principle.

First, remember that we are not talking about situations where something comes up and the Mayor alerts the Rangers that it is happening. If the Mayor communicates his/her unavailability, no harm done. The Rangers know to pick up the slack and check the threads. We're talking about failure to communicate, which would have to be construed as negligence.

If there's a death in your family, you don't simply fail to show up for work for two weeks without telling anyone what happened. No one would accept an excuse like that. No matter how awful the tragedy, people find a way to communicate the fact that it has happened.

The Mayor has things to do every week. It would be grossly negligent to disappear for two weeks without telling anyone why at any time during those two weeks. There's always a way to alert others that disaster has struck - an email, a phone call, asking someone else nearby to post an alert for you. We should perhaps ask the Mayor to establish a backup plan at the beginning of his/her office - who to call in an emergency, you know - but we can't exempt the Mayor from doing his/her job just because stuff happens, oops, someone was banned for an extra week, bad luck, sorry.

If all three infractions were a failure to schedule admin terms of office that would mean that half the terms did not get scheduled! I would definitely say that failing to show up half the time is grounds for removal.

But I'm think that three times might be too few for any combination of those failures because some tasks happen more frequently that others. So I'd like to put some options up for us to vote on - like perhaps three, five, seven infractions.

I don't think it is necessary to give formal warnings to the Mayor because the Rangers would certainly tell a Mayor what had to be done in his/her absence, and the Mayor will be accountable for knowing, from the Handbook and the Charter, that repeated disappearances will result in removal.

TH - it seems logical to me that the Rangers would be given somewhat more latitude because they interact more with the members and are exposed to more complaints. A Ranger can be given a warning for blowing up at a member, and it's not so difficult to be in a position where one might be tempted to do that. Also, the things Rangers can be warned for do not have such serious consequences, whereas a disappearance by the Mayor really makes a lot of work for others and might unfairly discriminate against members. It's true that the Mayor is on the job for a longer period of time, but only has weekly responsibilities (not daily) and isn't exposed to irritations. So I don't mind that we give the Mayor less slack.

Jn

truehobbit wrote:

A Ranger needs 15 offenses before being removed, and they only serve three months.

If this is correct (yes, yes, I'm too lazy to go and check! ) then truehobbit has a good point. I don't see the Mayor's office as being that much more important than the rangers. It is slightly, but 15 offenses to 3? That's quite a difference.

But, Jn's paragraph does have this in it:

Quote:

through negligence and without giving advance warning of his/her absence

I would think the type of person to get elected to the office of mayor would be the type of person to come in and at least tell someone that they can't do their job right then. By giving warning, that would prevent them from any offenses correct?

But as Anth said, 3 offenses could very easily occur all in one week. There could possibly be family emergencies that could be serious enough to keep someone away for that long.

Is there any way we could make certain offenses more serious like not giving notice for an election? Things like updating the jury pool immediately don't seem that serious to me in comparison.

Quote:

If the Mayor communicates his/her unavailability, no harm done.

I did catch that part, Jn, and I think that is probably exactly what would happen if a Mayor had a sudden issue which prohibited him/her from doing their job. If someone had a big problem that would keep them away from the computer for a stretch of time, they would most probably find a way to communicate.

I was just remembering last year, when I had a fairly tight week planned, and suddenly ended up spending three days in the hospital with my daughter, to support her through emergency surgery and its aftermath. I didn't SEE a computer for those three days. When I left the house that morning to take her to the ER, I had no idea I'd come dragging back three days later (yes, wearing the same clothes... it was SO not pretty.) I couldn't have notified anyone on this board in any kind of a timely fashion, and probably would have gotten a couple of derelictions during that time, had I been Mayor.

Perhaps I'm just being a devil's advocate here (or maybe I should have read the Admin removal thread before I answered this ) but I am just of the opinion that RL happens and by having a very strict policy in place we may catch more than one worthy Mayor in our net unintentionally.

I still can't figure out a system to weed out chronic negligence without somehow making it not structured enough.

Anth:

I didn't SEE a computer for those three days ... I couldn't have notified anyone on this board in any kind of a timely fashion,

But that particular instance would not have constituted failure to communicate because the Mayor only has to be online once a week and isn't officially 'missing' until gone for two weeks.

It's hard for me to imagine that a personal crisis lasting this long would not prompt a person to rearrange all of their schedule, including calling work and letting their friends know what's going on.

The Rangers are different because we feel their absence after two or three days. If a Ranger were gone for three days without saying anything, people would ask where they were. Not so the Mayor.

Perhaps I'm just being a devil's advocate here ...

Nothing wrong with that! That's what the thread is for.

By having a very strict policy in place we may catch more than one worthy Mayor in our net unintentionally.

I've put some less stringent choices into the draft ballot. Do you think they are sufficient to cover the options people might want to have?

chronic negligence

In my experience, chronic negligence becomes obvious pretty quickly. One feels constantly annoyed because things are never quite done when they should be. Actually there's little we can do about chronic negligence that takes place below the threshold. A passive aggressive Mayor could make Ranger lives hell for a whole year.

That's one argument for a fairly low threshold, because it might be that after three or four months the Rangers are watching the Mayor like hawks to catch that one delay that slips over the threshold and allows them to put a mark on the chalkboard. Not nice to think about, but it happens in RL and it will eventually happen here, too.

Jn

I'm with Jn on this. If a situation occurred where the Mayor really was justified in not communicating, then they won't be removed. But I absolutely think that 3 would be enough to justify removal in many situations. I think that the option should be there.

Are we ready to vote or are we still discussing? (This looks ready to go to me. I tend to agree that the Mayor needs to stay in communication - and it's not that hard.)

Hi Ethel. :)

I think we are still discussing, athough I agree that this looks about ready to go. But I think I would like to try to have all three pending votes up at the same time, so that people can come and vote for all three. Also, I know that weekends are sometimes hard for some people, so I generally like to make sure that a vote at least extends into a weekday.

I added a clause to the last question, regarding the requirement that a Loremaster attend hearings to remove.

There are four Draft Ballots up for review right now. Since Monday is a holiday in the U.S. and lots of people are away for this particular holiday, I thought we would begin the vote on Tuesday morning (GMT) and leave it up for 48 hours because just about everyone should be here on Wednesday.

That also gives us a chance to review carefully some of these complicated ballots. The standing committees one has me worried because people have not really been paying much attention to that. I'm afraid that we'll open a vote and it will suddenly hit them that they don't like anything they see.

Jn

I'll try to read up on these threads and offer my input tonight and perhaps tomorrow night; unfortunately (or not ) I will be on vacation from July 4 to July 13, and will have no computer access.

See ya'll when I get back!

Jnyusa,

It's great. I think we are ready to vote.

Anthy,
A case of chronic negligence. Have a great time.

Anth, have a great time in Jee-OH-Jah. Bring me back some red clay.

Idylle - great. I'll leave this one alone then if no one else objects to anything.

Jn

Quote:

Anth, have a great time in Jee-OH-Jah. Bring me back some red clay

You got it, WW. Or maybe I can find some nice butterflies...


IdylleSeethes, hey, I gave notice! <fumes>

If I could use Dad's computer, I could still participate. But at 42 years old, I am still not trusted to mess with the computer, drive his car, eat sitting at the couch, etc. Families...

Ballot looks good from here.