T2Eagle

That there is some first class, high priced gobbledygook.

Together with the questionable judgment of selling to a member of the Exec Board, ticking off a sitting US Senator is rarely a smart move. At a minimum, if they were going to sell to the highest bidder than the bidding should have been open, public, and transparent. It's also worth noting that they say the funds are going to be reinvested in the other camps; they are not claiming, at least in the current statement, that the fubds are going into the bankruptcy trust.

Nice, but you, and the paper, buried the lede, at least for folks on this forum. "A local troop of Boy Scouts built the new stand using plans provided by Jekyll staff along with purchased and recycled lumber." I am a bit famous, or maybe infamous, among both my family and my scouts for pointing out almost every raptor I see. It's hard to explain to them that thanks to DDT and other pressures I spent the first 25 years of my life hiking and camping, and never saw a bald eagle or osprey, and only occasionally caught a glimpse of a hawk. Today, I see a hawk pretty much every day in my suburban back yard, and even regularly see an eagle working the fish in the retention pond in my subdivision. It's a marvel to me --- every time.

The answer to pretty much all of your questions is yes, the Church can do and decide all of those things if that is how they want to run their troop. The Chartering Organization, the Church in your case, has absolute control of the program --- who can belong, scout or adult, what roles they can have, what decisions they can make etc. The Church has an Executive Officer who is in absolute charge of the troop. In your case this might be the pastor or it might be the Church president --- whoever is the top person at the church. That person either picks a Chartering Organization Representative, or takes on the duties themselves. The COR is responsible for selecting a Committee Chair who then sets up and runs the troop under the guidance of the COR. The COR is soley in charge of who is and is not allowed to be an adult leader in the troop. All the things you talk about: fundraising, adult training, summer camp are all decisions that the COR can, if they wish, delegate to various member of the troop, but they are all legitimate concerns of the church. Everything the troop does, it does in the name of the church. Fundraising: the bank account the troop uses is owned by the church -- check out the EIN or government tax ID on the account, it's the church's. There may be things that the church doesn't think is appropriate for the church to be associated with, the church has a duty to make sure the funds are both raised and spent in a proper manner. Failure to do that could lead the church into hot water tax wise or could even threaten the church's tax free status. Summer camp: if a scout gets hurt the church may be responsible for all the subsequent costs of that injury. So a church very well might say, no we don't think transporting 30 kids six hours in half a dozen cars is a good idea, find something closer. Training: there's probably no more important area for a COR to be involved in. Not only should the COR be sure that all YPT is done correctly and on time, but they should also be cognizant of all the safety training, are folks up to date on Weather, Safe Boating, SafeSwim, etc. Because, again, when something goes wrong it's the church that's on the hook even more than the people on the troop committee. As in any well run organization alot of this can be delegated. The COR picks people they trust, those folks run the day to day in the way the COR wants, and they make sure that the COR has all the reports and information they need to understand what;s happening and that everything is being run properly. I have a friend in our troop who also struggles with this concept that the troop is not a separate thing from the church. What I remind him is that there is no difference between the choir and the troop. Both are merely subsets of the parish. Yes, there's a music director and that eprson decides who is on the choir and what songs they're going to sing --- but only to a point. If the church doesn't want you singing a particular song on Sunday, or wants you to sing a different song, than it doesn't really matter what the music director or the members of the choir think.

Our National bird is not to be messed with. One of my WB patrol mates had as his first job out of college working for the Ohio DNR climbing up to each of the in state nests and banding the live chicks. When grabbing one of the birds his chain mail glove/sleeve slipped, and he was left with a beautiful fore arm long scar --- from a chick too young to even fly yet. At the time there were only two nesting pairs on the entire Ohio Lake Erie shore. Today, thankfully, there's too many to count with precision.

Conversely, You cross out the section. At summer camp I take a video of my scouts, your scout wanders into the background or is part of the group when I'm shooting. I publish the video on my troop's website. You sue, your legal argument is weak, in my state virtually nonexistent, but my CO is down $10,000 in legal fees before the first eye is blinked. Same facts, but this time it's Action News that takes the exact same video and runs it as a feel good filler on the 11 o'clock news. Both Council, and me take that video, publish it on our websites. You sue, if you're willing to represent yourself; my CO and Council don't even bother with the $10,000 because Eyewitness News will take care of that, and you're laughed out of court because of a little thing called the US Constitution. Same ultimate result every time: which is that there was no harm to your scout and never was, because this isn't about Youth Protection and never was. It was always only about commercial use of an image and cutting down on silly lawsuits.

Thanks, I took a look at that. It has three data sets: year, council, CO, but it doesn't correlate them. So it works if your CO is uniquely named. Mine is a Catholic CO, and there's no way of knowing which "St. John Parish" has been named.

That's a good question. I asked if my CO had been named in any of the claims and was told no. I should have asked if we would have been told if we had been named. I didn't do a deep dive into the claims to see how well a CO could be identified, maybe someone who has examined them more closely could answer whether a CO could find out for themselves if they went looking.

So the "bill" we're talking about is not related, at least directly, to whether a CO continues as a CO. COs aren't going to be given a statement and told pay this or you won't be allowed to be a CO any more. You pay into the fund as a means of protecting yourself against things that already happened. Deciding not to continue as a CO doesn't keep you from being sued for events that already happened in the past. Whether to pay and whether to continue as a CO are unrelated decisions.

In what way are scouts not safe in the current BSA? My LC has 2-3 claims filed that are within the SOL, which means sometime i the last two decades. These are of course untested claims so it's not even clear they reveal anything. Improvements will hopefully make things better, but there is very little evidence that scouts today are meaningfully unsafe in scouting. Not perfect doesn't mean not safe.

How so and by who? The release has nothing to do with Youth Protection it is all about commercial use of a person's image. Even if you cross out that section it's a long way from there to being able to be compensated by BSA for incidentally walking into the background of a photo that's later published. Whoever told you there were ways around not having the release was right, depending on the state there are lots of ways around that. And as I mentioned, it would be even further a stretch to be able to take action against a regular person who posts it to Facebook, and virtually nothing at all that could be done about someone who puts that picture in their own scrapbook.

We've had this come up in our unit. Oddly, what drives this the most is the bit about not being compensated for use of the image, sound, etc. From a practical point of view there's no way for BSA or councils to avoid taking someone's picture if they're taking pictures at all. If someone really wants their child's photo to not be used, especially for reasons like MattR talks about above, they can talk to council after an event and try to get any picture of their kid cropped out. But if you think about things like summer camp videos, or even just publicity photos for a press release or something similar, it would be virtually impossible to identify every kid caught in a frame and then track down their parents for individual releases. You have pretty much no rights to keep someone from photographing you, and you have only some control over people publishing those photos. Most of that control comes in the form of being able to demand compensation in the event that the picture is being used specifically for a commercial purpose like advertising for summer camp. If someone, anyone, captures you or your kid in a picture and then posts it on say Facebook you have no real right to stop that or demand that it be taken down.

You're forgetting about decades of argument/discussion/problems with and caused by racial segregation/desegregation/integration etc. Plus whatever prompted the changes in 1972 and then the backlash and response to those changes, etc., etc. A large, nationwide organization is going to contain and reflect the large nationwide problems and changes of its given time.

Welcome to the forums.

True last minute is rare, I was thinking more about the number of times where at the Wednesday night before a campout we count heads and realize we need one more person, or we need a sub for someone who had previously committed and now has to back out.

Current process is 1) completing a full application, 2)getting it signed/approved by Committee Chair, 3) get it signed and approved by Chartered Organization Rep., 4) Get it to council office along with printed copy of YP training certificate, 5) pay $45 registration fee, 6) council has to obtain background check, 7) Scout Exec has to review application & background check, 8 approved application has to be entered into council system, 9) unit has to be notified that volunteer now approved and registered. Often times, when we're talking about a previously unregistered parent attending camp for the first time, it can either be a last minute decision where we need more leaders to drive and cover the activity, or at best it's maybe two weeks out when plans for both troop and volunteer family are finalized.

This was the area that really concerned me when talking about the 72 hour rule changing to full registration/backgrounding. I hope they're able to develop a way for adults to be registered more quickly and inexpensively. My troop can handle having to register and background anybody camping with the troop, but I know that smaller and less well resourced troops will struggle with this, especially if the process remains as cumbersome and costly as it currently is.

Quite a document. The things that jump out to me are the attempts at transparency and accountability. I've thought for a while that BSA has for too long only answered to itself, and that lack of accountability has led to insular thinking and poor practices.

I forgot to add to my post that they didn't attach the supposed agreement. Very few agreements truly prevent any alienation. Clearly there are various levels of value to the paintings, I've purchased a couple of prints of "The Scoutmaster" and not from BSA. Likely whoever buys the paintings buys them with whatever encumbrances there may be.

Not quite that they don't own it, rather that they share ownership of it in some way with Brown and Bigelow, a publishing company. The filing goes on to say that there is a 1991 written agreement in which BSA acknowledged the joint ownership AND agreed that neither party could assign its ownership interest to anyone without the permission of the other party. If this is true it is another example, in my opinion, of how both sloppy, arrogant, and presumptuous BSA has operated all these years. They just never felt like they were ever going to have to answer to anyone but themselves about anything.

So, not having read the plan closely enough to speak specifically to it, I'll try to answer this generically. How much, and how, and when a lawyer representing a claimant gets paid is between the claimant and the lawyer. Some law firms have a lot of clients and probably use the same fee agreement for all of them. But there are (probably) hundreds of firms who have clients in this case. Not all of them are charging 40%, they may not all even be contingent, there are certainly some folks who are attorneys and representing themselves, there are almost certainly folks who aren't attorneys representing themselves. Whenever the trust starts sending out checks, presumably some claimants will have their lawyer do all the legwork and have the full payment sent to the lawyer, in which case the lawyer will then figure out their fees and send the client the balance. But also presumably some claimants will get their check directly, and then have to turn around and cut a check to their lawyer. The mechanics of all this is probably contained in the fee agreements between lawyers and clients. It is very much not the Trust's responsibility to make sure that the lawyers get paid their contingency fees. All of the above is about fees based on the work done for individual claimants, and paid after the trust is funded and starts paying victims. Because this is a bankruptcy, there are also legal fees that may be related to and necessitated by the bankruptcy process. They'll be paid as part of the process. I don't know enough to know whether they're paid by BSA before it funds the trust or if they're paid from the trust after it is funded. The TCC's lawyers fall into this category, and if memory serves, the Coalition lawyers want to fall into this category, and that is under dispute. Hope this helps, there are better informed legal minds than mine on here. I hope they chime in to clean my thoughts up.

In broad strokes, presumably one of the assets assigned to the trust would be BSA's rights to insurance coverage. Part of the trust's responsibility would be to collect those monies, certainly suing the insurers could be part of that. It would be very unusual, probably not allowed, if the trust were set up to sue other entities like LCs.

That sounds much more reasonable. Hope the other troop makes a similarly reasonable choice, even if it's not the same camp.

The constitutional objection is that claimants are losing their property interest in a law suit against the non debtor parties without having any chance in court, ie they are being denied due process. Their other big objection is that the bankruptcy statute doesn't allow the releases.

What would they base the idea of a "huge liability" on. Is there data somewhere that says using a chipper is more likely to lead to injury than a chainsaw? Some specific insurance rider that indicates using one necessitate a higher premium? Most of the time that I hear people talk about liability they barely understand what the term really means, and it's almost always based on some gut instinct rather than real information.