T2Eagle

To be clear, it's the youth who cannot do this. There's no prohibition I can see for adults using a chipper.

Is there a specific question you're trying to answer? And when you say last five do you mean last five years or last five variations? They remained the same for a few years at a time, or at least with unnoticeable differences.

I read through it. I wasn't very familiar with previous versions, but I don't see the big changes in National and local changes. Help me out. The elimination of an Arbitration clause is unusual, but I'm not that big a fan of how arbitration works these days so that's fine with me. The constructive trust language on council properties is there, but I know that not all councils sign off on that exact language. The special assessment proposal should be a non starter for LCs; I hope they rise up against that. Of course near as I can tell there is no requirement for any greater amount of transparency or governance owed to we the worker bees.

It's a bit of both, an investment with some ongoing maintenance. For the most part you've already done most of the work: securing the client, filing initial paperwork, managing the voting process, etc. Now there's just some minimal work: keeping an eye on the docket, keeping your client informed, maybe answering a question from him here or there. That's the nature of a law practice, you have a number of cases going on at any one time, but you're not actively putting work in on all of them. It's doubtful anyone would need to turn down one client because of the work involved with another client. And ALL cases take a long time. In my jurisdiction, the time between initial filing and an actual trial if it has to go to trial on a civil case is more than two years, creeping up to three.

One thing I've wondered about is what the court cases look like after a BSA only bankruptcy. If I understand it correctly, the main theory of negligence is that BSA, because of the extensiveness of the Ineligible Volunteer Files BSA, knew or should have known it had a problem with predators using its program to access victims. But if BSA is dismissed from the case how do the IV files get into evidence. Further, given that the files were kept secret even from the LCs, where is the negligence? A plaintiff would have to find a specific instance of negligence, and that would be much harder. The standard would be what would a reasonable person at that time have done. That's not an easy case to make.

I was thinking viable regarding the current process. Yes, a BSA national only plan is an alternative, but it would mean effectively starting the whole process over again having achieved nothing. It wouldn't change anything fundamental about the monies available to be fought/negotiated over, simply send most of those fights and negotiations into a string of dozens of other bankruptcies. It would, more importantly, ignore the expressed opinion of a majority of claimants that the current deal is acceptable.

My totally uninformed guess, is that the current plan, with maybe some slight non-monetary tweaks that come out of mediation, gets approved. Mostly because no other alternative seems viable. There’s no reason to think that a plan that necessitates a new vote is going to result in any more decisive a result than this one. Maybe more funds gets a slightly higher percentage approval, but it’s very likely that the voting participation rate drops, and so the clarity of a new vote being a representation of the will of the claimants doesn’t change. Part of the challenge is that it’s hard to negotiate with 80,000 people, and it’s clear that no one can speak with one voice in their stead. The TCC may hold their beliefs sincerely, but the people they’re supposed to represent rejected their recommendation soundly. Unless they’ve done some soul searching and really changed their stance, their views simply aren’t in step with a majority of claimants. Similarly, the Coalition may legally represent a majority of claimants, but I haven’t seen any evidence that they can deliver approval votes in any higher proportion than they already did. If third party releases simply aren’t allowed as a matter of law, then the last two years are for naught, and we’re staring over. But as I understand it that’s not yet decided in this circuit, so for this judge the proper thing is approve a plan and see if a district or circuit court wants to make that decision. So that leaves move this plan forward, because there are still lots of issues that can’t be decided until this first step is taken.

My advice is that you speak only to what you know. If someone asks you about a particular suit, tell them you don't know the details and aren't familiar with it --- because you're not. Offer to either point them to someone at council who can better answer their question, or offer that you'll try to get someone to better answer their question. If people want to know about Youth Protection in general tell about your own experiences: what do you, and your unit, and the leaders you know and work with do to keep kids safe --- both from abuse and from all the other things that can go wrong in scouts and in life. Don't speculate. The worst answer would be guessing at something you're not sure of.

2nd quarter 2020, my wife, a physician in a national healthcare company, along with all the other physicians in the company, took what turned out to be a temporary 25% pay cut. All non emergent procedures had been cancelled, revenue dried up. The alternative was layoff a bunch of support staff. Rather than throw the least well paid folks out of work, which would have resulted in plenty of hardship for them, the better paid folks took a hit. None of them liked it, but they were certainly better able to absorb it.

You seem to be toggling between two different things, PR and organizational reform. Setting aside whether they can ever be effectively separated, I thought we were talking about PR. We may differ about what PR problem BSA had. In the years leading up to the change in SOL laws that led to the bankruptcy, Youth Protection wasn't really the image problem BSA had. The three "G"s: God, Gays, and Girls, were the issues scouting was getting hammered on in public opinion. Our society had largely changed its views in these areas. After all, no matter whether you were gay, a girl, or an atheist, you could be a marine and fight and die for your country, but somehow you weren't good enough to be a scout or scout leader. To the extent that there were concerns about Youth Protection, for the most part BSA could point and say "terrible things happened in the past, but we've changed how we do things, and we do as well or better than anyone today." From what little polling I saw, and from my own anecdotal experience, this was where the public was. I rarely if ever got questions or had discussions about YPT, but membership rules did come up, both from potential parents and public discussions more generally. So for BSA, the PR message at the start of the bankruptcy was "these terrible things happened in the past, but we're going to do the right thing, it's going to be painful but we'll do it, get past it, and move on into the future."

It's worth remembering that starting out that's what they thought they were doing, and it looked like they might be. At 1/10th the number of claimants the opt out payment is $35,000 and everyone is looking at minimum 10x the amount of compensation. That looks a lot more like the "equitable compensation" they were talking about, and it probably gets a quick approval and we're already post bankruptcy.

There's a decent lag between when you do the recharter and when it becomes set in stone. get in touch with your registrar; don't take no for an answer.

Welcome to the forum. Having all camping be "mandatory" is very unusual, and I'm not even sure how a troop could go about enforcing it. Many troops have minimum attendance requirements for rank advancement, but rank advancement itself is entirely up to the scout and whether he or she wants to do scouting that way. EDIT: I just reread your post, and I think I misread your primary concern ---I need more coffee. If your concern is being able to participate in the campout yourself, every scouting activity is open to observation by parents at all times. Observing and participating may run a thin line, and many troops, if you're going to camp with them, as opposed to observe them camping, may require that you complete the BSA Youth Protection Training and even submit to a background check. If your biggest concern is how much "mandatory" camping they expect from parents, the answer, unless they're crazy, is none. Although some parents/adult leaders are necessary for a campout to happen, as long as we're talking about ScoutsBSA, ie Boy Scouts, and not the younger Cub Scouts I have never heard of any troop requiring a parent be present for each scout. I would encourage you to take your son to a meeting, and talk to some of the adult leaders and other parents to get some clarification on all of this. And if that troop isn't your cup of tea, reach out to your local Boy Scout Council and find out what other troops there are in your area. There are as many different subtle flavors of scouting as there are ice cream, and you should be able to find one your son enjoys.

Welcome to the forums. Interesting thread to resurrect. Any particular reason you did? Coincidentally, a discussion of audits came up in my unit recently. As you cite, many civic organizations have standards for when an audit should or must occur. One of the things we reminded ourselves during our discussion is that we are not "an organization" in the conventional sense. We are a subset of a larger organization, the Chartering Organization, in my case a Catholic parish. Our books, our funds, our bank account are not ours --- they're the parish's. It's not really for us to open them up for outsiders to see. The parish has its own financial guidelines and procedures, but even if they didn't, any decision to disclose to a third party or outside authority is for the CO to make, not us. As a result of the thoughts above about the control of financial information being held by the CO, on the council form for fundraising there is a question about the troop's bank balance. I never answer that. The troop doesn't have a bank account, the CO does. If council wants to know about that they can go through the parish --- who generally won't answer.

Our training for parents is to make sure your son gathers everything and checks it off the checklist, and then make sure HE puts it in the pack. Unless we're backpacking, I always keep some spare gear in my car. Especially for newer scouts, one miserable experience can end their scouting career. Sixteen year olds who show up with nothing but a hoodie for a November campout get a lot less sympathy. A scout is Helpful so I share what I have, but I don't have to wash my own dishes that weekend. If we're backpacking we do at minimum a check for raingear and sufficient clothing layers before we get in the cars.

My nephew recently moved to the mountains of Utah, he and his sons' first troop campout was in October --- snowy at 7000 feet. His not so subtle message to me with the pictures he sent was "hey Uncle T2, you're not the toughest camper in the family any more. " ETA, although I don't think where he is he'll ever again encounter the 35 degrees and raining that we often see here in the Midwest/Northeast, which I think is really the most miserable of conditions.

I can't get past the pay wall. Is the story getting it's source from court filings, or did a spokesperson actually make a separate statement claiming its own initial analysis was wrong? If it's the latter it is both distasteful and dumb.

I was able to get the multiple function to work for the Pack's recharter so that people who's primary role was with the troop weren't charged to the pack. And I was able to get the multiple function to work for the troop to get some council primary folks for $0, but I couldn't get the people who are primary to the Pack off the troop's books. But we pay by check not electronically, so my solution was to only pay what we owed rather than over pay and wait for a refund. Bemoaning this with a fellow scouter I said it was the inevitability of a major bug that was so striking. But BSA never just goes back and fixes all the bugs from a previous try, they always try to roll out a new system to use --- even tough they've demonstrated that they're just not good at it.

Here is my revised response. In case you haven't seen it there is a statement about insurance on the BSA website. Here's the link and a snippet of it. "Comprehensive General Liability Insurance This coverage provides primary general liability coverage for registered adults of the Boy Scouts of America who serve in a volunteer or professional capacity concerning claims arising out of an official Scouting activity... (t)his coverage responds to allegations of negligent actions by third parties that result in personal injury or property damage claims that are made and protects Scouting units and chartered organizations on a primary basis..." https://www.scouting.org/health-and-safety/gss/gss10/ Of course, until you see the policy, you can't really know what it says and who is covered. I've always carried my own umbrella policy. BUT, you aren't currently chartered. I would think your safest assumption is that BSA is not providing coverage. I say this as a COR for a Catholic parish: kick this back to your pastor to decide. As I mentioned, the parish, which is really the diocese, has lots of youth programs, they should be able to figure out how to let you operate safely.

The very first question I have for you is when does your charter expire? Our charter runs through the end of this month, so irrespective of whether we use a traditional charter agreement or some new version of something, nothing is different until the current charter actually expires. Respectfully, when you're talking about insurance for and releases for "abuse and molestation" you're talking about things that you really don't have a handle on, and you shouldn't be guessing or opining about them to and for your unit. I couldn't and wouldn't do justice to trying to fully explain what you're missing in your understanding, but at a basic level you are only ever insured against negligence, which can broadly be defined as failure to use reasonable care, resulting in damage or injury to another. Your negligence could take the form of your not following or enforcing YPT and your failure to do so resulting in abuse, or your negligence could take the form of not being mindful of the conditions on the sled hill resulting in a kid smacking into a tree. You shouldn't be deciding this, your pastor should be. He probably has a pretty good understanding of where the parish's liability and insurance lies, and he has easy access to experts and attorneys through the diocese. Your parish probably has lots of youth programs, all of them carry risks. There is probably not a lot of legal distinction between your troop heading on a campout and the eight grade boys CYO team heading over to St. Pat's for a basketball tournament. Your diocese knows how all this works, your pastor has access to that knowledge. You don't actually know how it all works, and you shouldn't be guessing. ETA, you should already be getting a signed permission slip for every outing, that permission slip should include a broad based release however hard they may be to enforce. If your diocese participates in Virtus it's one of the instructions in that training that you have a signed permission slip for every trip. You need a lawyer to draft that, you cannot try doing it yourself.

Agree, I really don't see why they can't make progress on those two non monetary facets. I may have some skepticism about the merits of the individual YP proposals: independent audits, universal background checks, more survivors on the board, etc., but as someone in the field running units, none of those things would be backbreakers, and we could learn to live with all of them. The independence of the settlement trust seems really easy, after all, how much does BSA care who's distributing money that no longer belongs to them. My best guess is that the bankruptcy specialist lawyers BSA is employing have no real knowledge and so no real interest in working hard at YP, while the desire to control the trust is probably instinctual rather than well thought out.

I typed this once and it didn't seem to post. Maybe that organizational design would be better. You can make the same arguments for and against that you can make for any federalist system in a country as large and diverse as ours. You can look back in this forums for lots of discussion of the pros and cons of "local option". More local control could better allow some councils to tailor their program to meet the needs of their local community, but I think there would also be places in the country that would not have made or continue to allow the recent membership changes: the acceptance of non heterosexual leaders and scouts, and the implementation of full membership for girls. I think those changes have been very positive, and would be unhappy to see them regress, but lots of other folks feel differently.

This is a pretty big misunderstanding some folks have. LCs don't exist at the sufferance of National. Their permission to use BSA IP is tied to their ongoing renewal of their charters, but if National disappeared tomorrow my LCs legal standing as a non profit corporation permitted by and governed by the laws of my state would not change. The property the LC owns belongs to the LC, and no they have never signed a charter that would hand it over to National at National's request or demand.

Local salaries are all covered locally. The cash NEVER flows from National down. The majority of the people on my LC's board are drawn from the same pool of folks who also serve on other local charity and organization boards: health care systems, other non-profits, local colleges, local government, senior execs from local businesses, law firms, financial services, etc. I can make a good argument that everybody being from the same pool is a poor organizational design for great decision making, but these are not people who are unfamiliar with being board members or the idea of understanding their own personal liability. My experience is that as a governing body they do view themselves and operate themselves as distinct and independent corporations and organizations. Most of them would try to continue to function even in the event of a big collapse at National.

I've been trying to think of what is a realistic expectation of an acceptance level. When you're talking about tens of thousands of people, trying to get a high percentage of agreement on anything is nearly impossible. For instance, there are some challenges to the methodology of them poll, but recently only two thirds of folks polled believed the earth was round. In this case, it's easy to imagine that, say, 10 to 15 percent of claimants won't be satisfied with anything less than burn it all down. It's also not hard to imagine some similar sized group, maybe slightly smaller, for whom burn it all down is just as unacceptable. Plus there are the claimants in closed states, it's very possible that anything that's involuntary rather than negotiated is likely to leave them with no definite compensation. I'm not sure how you add all that up and expect to get anything more than a couple percentage points higher than the 73% acceptance that was already achieved.