by With my election to the NRA Board of Directors there will be some changes that must come to the blog.
I will now have the fiduciary duties of care, loyalty, and obedience. I have written extensively on this blog in the past about fiduciary duties and how certain segments of the Board blithely ignored them. I will not be one of those directors.
If you are a party in a lawsuit against the NRA, I cannot respond to you as you are an adverse party and all communications should be between the respective parties’ attorneys. This is upon the advice of outside legal counsel.
Letters, emails, and other confidential information from the NRA that may have been leaked to me in the past will need to stay confidential. However, this does not mean that information that is in the public domain such as filings with regulators and court documents cannot be shared. I can still share my opinion on this but I will probably be doing less of it.
There is still a world of things going on with regard to the Second Amendment, gun rights, wildlife conservation, and other things that I find of interest to write on.
One final note. This is a private blog and not a public forum. I have comment moderation enabled to cut down on the spam. Please do not force me to disable all comments with comments to which I am obligated not to respond.
I understand that your changes are necessary due to your election. If you and the other reform minded Directors can accomplish the needed changes, it will be worth it.
Also, you’re have detractors from the Old Guard, and from the Throw The Bums Out and Start Fresh crowd. One because you do too much and the other because they believe you don’t do enough. Act as your conscience dictates and you’ll be fine.
He did endorse Willes Lee and Jim Porter. That’s problematic.
Congrats and good luck! Thanks for all you do.
Regarding your statements “If you are a party in a lawsuit against the NRA, I cannot respond to you as you are an adverse party and all communications should be between the respective parties’ attorneys. This is upon the advice of outside legal counsel.”
Hmm…one wonders if the NRA et al understands the IRS component of the RICO lawsuit with money laundering between the Foundation and the NRA. For example, potentially hundreds of millions of dollars laundered from the Foundation to the NRA could results in millions of dollars of back taxes, including interest and fines!!!
Good point.
Mr. Richardson,
This post sounds like an attack on your part, directed at Mr. Dell’Aquila.
It doesn’t look good, for someone who claims to be a reformer, who will shortly be assuming his seat at the directors table, to insinuate that Mr. Dell’Aquila, and presumably anyone else who’s spent years and countless dollars, on trying to correct what the GARGANTUAN 76 member board of directors at the NRA has failed to do, an “adverse party”. And to make unveiled threats to remove such people from your blog.
Perhaps if you’d taken the time earlier when writing about his RICO lawsuit, to actually interview him, you’d have come away with a different understanding of what his goals are. Instead, this whole post sounds like a direct attack on Mr. Dell’Aquila, in which you only left out his name.
This isn’t too surprising, given your endorsements of crooks like Willes Lee and Jim Porter.
If you do ban people like Mr. Dell’Aquila from your blog, and others who might bring up inconvenient truths regarding the NRA, do be aware, the NRA’s member to director email system is inoperable. So you will be TOTALLY cutting yourself off from member communications.
You don’t have to leak anything, just make the NRA and its Board more transparent to its members. That’s who you work for, remember?
How about setting up a member’s only area where FULL minutes (except confidential personnel information) of every NRA meeting – executive, stafff, board, committee – are posted?
Until proven otherwise – the executives, staff and board of the NRA cannot be trusted.
If you had gone back and read some of my earlier posts, you would have seen that I not only have called for posting of minutes but livestreaming of the meetings themselves. I said if small municipalities can livestream their council and board meetings then there is no reason the NRA cannot do the same.
https://onlygunsandmoney.com/?p=34960
https://onlygunsandmoney.com/?p=34983
I have expressed my dismay that Judge Cohen didn’t include such things as posting the bylaws, meeting minutes, financial reports, and regulatory filings on a members-only website as part of the Final Order in the NY trial. I will be introducing a resolution at the Meeting of Members calling for that.
Thanks.
Looking forward to your efforts to have livestreaming of meetings and a members only area of the NRA website to view minutes of all meetings.
I say what I’m about to as an advocate of more livestreaming for civil society groups and as someone who has actually converted in person only conferences into livestreamed sessions. I’m clearly not an opponent at all, but a realist who looks at the financial situation NRA is in.
Pushing for a livestream is CRAZY right now. Seriously, crazy. Unless that push comes with specific recommendations on tens of thousands in cuts of regular spending elsewhere, then I can’t take that seriously.
I know what you say about regular municipal council meetings and such being streamed. Do you know what they have that NRA doesn’t for their board meetings? A single meeting room that usually isn’t very big. (And for the rooms that are bigger, they tend to be bigger cities.)
The proposal for livestreaming means purchasing additional hotel conference A/V services for every single meeting and requiring the contracts to secure staffing for far more services than necessary most of the time just in case a meeting goes crazy late again like it did after the reformers won. The last time I had to review a contract for this type of service was a couple of years ago in Pittsburgh and we only had about 8 hours of service on and off through the day with a few sessions being streamed over 2 days. That added $20,000 extra to the bill. And we had volunteers running a good part of it – only the mandatory minimums for pros to run some of the livestream systems. Assume in inflated dollars with the higher event expenses of the DC suburbs, you’re probably looking at far more than that – especially if they have to line up staff to be prepared to run it into the night or for another day.
Even if you get Bob Barr to stop billing NRA for his airline upgrades, that’s an awful lot of business class downgrades to pay for even one meeting. There are 3 every year to cover. You could put Bob Barr in the back of the plane on a Spirit flight for every trip and it won’t save that much.
Given that the board meetings themselves are rarely more than rah-rah speeches by the officers, a few so-so reports by top level staff, and relatively little debate most of the time, I seriously question this proposed abuse of member dollars. And I’m on team transparency, but not for mostly mindless reports at the expense of actually getting shit done. More work is done in committee meetings (though often not enough work is done there – that needs to change) and now you’re talking about adding that cost into every single room the committees are meeting in. And, to be honest, if I’m in a committee meeting where we go into executive session for valid reasons, I’m going to want to move to another room out of concern over trust that every device is really turned off.
Now there is a case to be made that board meetings could go to NRA headquarters and a room could be outfitted there for this kind of stuff, but now you need to balance the added cost and lost hours of paying to transport everyone from the hotel to HQ. It’s not pure cost cutting. And since you’ll lose substantial time commuting between spaces during the meeting instead of just riding an elevator down, assume you need to add an extra day of meetings and board expenses on. Now you’ve got more new costs.
John, you know I’m team get more knowledge of the organization out there, but this proposal without a specific list of ongoing budget cuts elsewhere just does not have a good return.
I’ll ask this: Before pitching this, would you be willing to request any data on the number of people who viewed the old NRA New livestreams of the Annual Meeting of Members? That’s a meeting that would naturally attract more direct member interest and they already had the staff and platforms to stream at the time. (They had to pay for another setup area vs. Cam’s live shows in the exhibit hall, but I only recall seeing the regulars from A-M who helped run those shows actually doing the expensive work.) That should be important information to know before asking the organization to commit many tens of thousands of dollars to livestreaming board meetings.
I would personally focus on the more cost effective portal and transparency efforts. I ask that as a life member, please. Use my member dollars wisely.
After reduction of the size of the BOD to 10-15 the expenses would be much less.
I agree, no spending of money on livestreaming.
First step is full transcript disclosure of all meetings. Transparency first.
How about putting forth a resolution to create a FUNCTIONING member to director email system?
Sec. Frazer and CCO Mensinger have completely failed in that regard.
You are not an official board member until you are sworn in until sometime around the end of the month and therefore there are no conflicts before that time, and you can answer questions, that is if you care to!!!
I will be going to the NRA convention for several conversations and perhaps a distinguished patriot will also be coming.
I don’t get it… what’s so hard for some to understand about the fact that saving the NRA is going to need a two-pronged effort? We need both an Inside Team trying to work the board, and an Outside Team working the courts to compel changes when the Old Guard’s resistance exceeds the Inside Team’s available force to overcome.
Are Barr & Co. really so arrogant as to think they’ll win every time when activist officials put our Association in te crosshairs again? Judge Cohen let us off easy, but my read on the decision is it’s legalese “either fix these things on your terms, or next time New York will on ITS terms and you won’t like how WE do it.” (Full disclosure, I’m far from a lawyer but I spent quite a bit of time with the family attorney as a kid and learned a lot from him about Lawyerese.)