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