Council Sets Bylaws Election Period of Oct. 15-Nov. 15; Approves Council Compensation

Sunday, 02 October 2011 03:55

By 12th Moon,

Council President

Meeting in "The Space" on Sept. 13, Council approved eight items from our agenda, six unanimously, and tabled another two items, one for clarification and one because of a lack of time. As was noted while we considered a draft of the Council 2012 budget, it has been a great assistance to have our own location available for our Council, committee and membership meetings, providing adequate parking, consistency of location and an estimated savings of a thousand dollars just for room rentals.

Our General Manager (GM), Brandon Kane, was away attending a national GM meeting in Massachusetts, but his monthly report showed the stores doing well, with Oasis recording an impressive customer count that approached half that seen at the West-End store for one week as students returned. It was noted that our staff performed exceedingly well during a viral attack to our main computers, which disabled our discount system at the registers and generally wreaked havoc for two days. Many thanks to all of our customers who took the inconveniences well, to our great Customer Service staff and especially to Jeremy and Jonathan, our Information Services troopers, for a couple of way long hard days.

In preparation for fulfilling our goal of expanding our main store to a larger one owned and built by us, we next discussed contract negotiations with the National Cooperative Grocers Association Development Cooperative (NCGA/DC). Unfortunately, negotiations regarding an agreement with NCGA/DC to assist us with all phases of our expansion projects had not been resolved in time for our meeting (for further information please see the Council News column in September's GreenLeaf). A major expansion project will take us years to complete, and a certain urgency exists to get the process started before current opportunities change. To that end I will be calling for an Immediacies Committee meeting in conjunction with our regularly scheduled Executive Planning Committee meeting in September with the hopes that our questions will have been answered and negotiations resolved.

During the previous week our Treasurer, Bob Rhea, resigned from Council in order to better pursue his career objectives. Council member Tara Gross, currently our Council Secretary, stepped up to become our new Treasurer/Secretary. Thank you, Tara, for your continuing and extended service to GreenStar.

We next approved both a resolution to consolidate our managers' store credit card accounts into a single account, used for store purchases of goods, services and equipment, and accepted the GM's Second Quarter Financial Report as having been received on time and complete.

As you may have read in this column last month, we have had some issues with incomplete minutes from earlier this year. We were able to amend and approve the submitted minutes of both our June and July meetings, as well as commit to holding a special meeting to help achieve acceptable minutes from the April and May meetings to be presented next month.

GreenStar Community Projects (GSCP), our non-profit affiliate, organization presented an update of their progress and introduced us to an exciting event. "GSCP is organizing a Food Justice Summit on Saturday, Oct. 22, to mobilize locally for food sovereignty and raise funds to support food justice projects, specifically GSCP's current and future work to create a system of regional food sustainability that promotes health, equity, and community control of essential resources. The event will include a walk-a-thon in the morning and block party celebration outside Neighborhood Pride, the old P&C location on Hancock Street, in the afternoon with keynote speakers, live music, a local organic BBQ, educational tabling and much more. More info, including registration and pledge forms for the walk-a-thon, is available at: http://greenstarcommunityprojects.org/FJS/. Congratulations to all of you at GSCP for putting this together. Fellow GreenStar members, let's all get together to help support this important Ithaca cause and have some fun at the party, too.

Two GreenStar members were next appointed to our Membership and Finance committees respectively, Charis Boke and Jan Katz, filling vacant member-at-large seats. Thank you and welcome, Jan and Charis, to the list of members volunteering additional service and a commitment of your time and energy to our Co-op.

After our mid-meeting break we opened discussions of projected needs for the 2012 Council Budget. While we have realized savings from the use of The Space, and we will not need to fund the efforts of a GM search this year, we also have to take into account rising costs for our trainings and consultants. As this was an initial discussion, we came to no final decision, but our Finance and our Governance and Monitoring Committees will review suggestions and a proposed budget for next year should be coming to our October meeting.

The next item on our agenda, first drafts of some of our new policies using the Policy Governance format, received little discussion as we spent most of the time allotted in coming to agreement on a timeframe for implementing the new policies. During our working retreat weekend in July we had agreed to the November meeting as when we would be ready to implement new policies, but as that was not an official Council decision, and some felt it was too optimistic a timeline, we finally agreed to December as the deadline for completing the initial new policies for acceptance and implementation.

We next passed a proposal for tellers to oversee and count members' votes for our upcoming proposed bylaws amendments election. The voting period was set as Oct. 15 through Nov. 15 this year.

A Council compensation proposal, which has come before Council in previous months, was passed at the end of our meeting after the pros and cons were again discussed. The final decision reads: "Council members in 'good standing' will be paid quarterly for their service. To be a member in 'good standing,' a member must have Council and committee meeting attendance and participation that meets or exceeds the minimum standard established by the Council." Pay rates are as follows: President - $1,800 per year, Standing Committee Chairs - $900 per year, and General Council Members - $600 per year.

Finally, we tabled a discussion of possible changes to our equity structure for membership in the Co-op as we were out of time.