Tron

If you're going to point a finger point a finger at everybody that has and still is doing it. I live in a major metropolitan location here in America and right now, right here, on your watch, this city and many others are landfilling estuary. Captain conservation, make a list of all the bad actors.

If we're going to go down this road of complaint I feel the need to point out that every major city in the world is built at the intersection of water and those cities all contain significant acreage of landfilled estuary and wetlands that were turned into developable land.

What I am wondering is what happens with all those new 12 month memberships that will start expiring around Oct 1st. If membership are no longer pro-rated, and if historically cubs are primarily recruited in September, doesn't the new membership model start to shift the expired membership situation to around Oct 1st? Will national shift membership performance reviews now?

Everyone is freaking out over this and the headlines are all wordsmithing to make it sound like someone important made this/these statement(s). The lady who ran her mouth about this has no military experience or ties, she has no scouting experience or ties; however, somehow everyone thinks this is an issue. This is going to be much about nothing.

Membership loss on/after Jan 1st has always been an issue right? This is the first year where we have 2 major renewal deadlines though. What happens October 1st(ish) ?

Last year they withheld exact numbers until the national meeting to add more spice to the convention? Do you think that could be the case again this year?

There are so many competing claims about the settlement fund and what's in it, and what is supposed to be in it. Based on my research the settlement fund amount was agreed upon at 2.46 billion dollars; there is no legal claim to anything higher. 1 billion of that is funded and in place. The remaining 1.46 billion is locked up in various stages which include: Amounts that are not available due to asset liquidation being stalled due to issues outside of the control of the settlement court. Amounts that are not available due to cooperating insurance companies needing more time to liquidate assets to fund. Amounts that are not available because some insurance companies are refusing to pay out until all appeals are settled. Not to be insensitive but where is the larger pot of gold that people seem to speak of?

His numbers seem to jive with what I am seeing in my district/council. Sounds like we lost 25% of membership in 24 hours. On a personal note I got off the phone with my COR and I told them that we're fine, we have no action to take, the numbers that dropped from our roll were expected and unavoidable. I reminded them that the extra paperwork I had them chasing the past few weeks to get our handful of not renewed over the line is right now paying with dividends as no one at council can complain about our units membership status; we had no sloppy losses due to laziness (which I suspect a lot of other units are now dealing with).

In that global news wire thing they state more than a million which is purposely vague; however, knowing how non-profits like to do things I am going to assume that more than a million is closer to 1 million than any other milestone number above 1 million. I think we take this as a good thing, staying above 1 million for 2 years in a row is a sign that the membership decline has arrested. If they had reported just under 1 million or almost 1 million I would totally be in the oh snap, we're still declining camp. My special twist to this discussion though .... local rumors in my area are that "all hands on deck" emails were sent out last night concerning membership loss. Apparently the council I am in was not watching the expired membership reports and was counting everyone who had not renewed their membership on Dec 31, 2024 as members and yesterday when national dropped all of those people from the membership rolls my council lost somewhere around 25% of it's membership. What is everyone else hearing in their neck of the woods?

When distributing equalized there are some dangers based on how much and to how many. At any time if 30% of net income (annual) benefits any 1 individual it violates the inurement rules (Wendy L Parker Rehabilitation Foundation INC v C.I.R). If an excess of 8% of gross revenue (annual) goes to member benefits it violates personal gain versus non-profit mission rules (Spokane Motorcycle Club V US 222 F. Supp 151 ). There are a bunch of other cases that touch on smaller amounts but you're dealing with a big dollar item so these 2 are the most probable court cases that define IRS rules that you need to be weary of.

That was supposed to be done before the end of Oct '24. Did he say anything about what delayed/is delaying that action?

I know national has term limits for district and council chairs. There was a situation in my council where a chair refused to step down/aside and claimed there were no rules against it. National stepped in and told the chair to step down per policy or get banned from being a registered adult. That was a few years ago, might have changed, but doubt it considering that district and council committee training still reference term limits for chairs.

Finally seeing some YPT updates that were talked about in the 2024 NAM. I was told today that Emails went out to commissioners to spread the word that Scouting America is now asking all adult volunteers to load a headshot photo to their scoutbook/scoutbook+/my.scouting accouts. Last summer at the '24 NAM Glen Pounder said that he was going to mandate it because UK Scouting mandates it, and then it didn't happen until now. No sign of any of the other mandates that were talked about last year (annual YPT, YPT directly tied to registration status). Has anyone seen anything that was talked about at last years NAM rolled out other than this photo thing that is supposedly happening as of today?

At the unit level this is hard to address. At the district or council level (so say, chapter or lodge) it is easier to push these people out. I am not 100% familiar with OA rules; however, most volunteer roles outside of unit roles are 1 year terms that are renewed by district or council, anything really important such as chairs etc ... typically have a 2-3 year max type restriction somewhere in the books. For example a district or council chair is not supposed to hold the position for more than 2 years consecutively to keep people from becoming the king of the castle so to speak. I bet the OA has rules like this somewhere. I know that my local lodge has some sort of rule about not being able to be an adviser unless the person is the parent of a dues paying youth member; I don't know if that is a local rule or an OA rule, might be worth checking out. Good luck.

This is not correct. Once money is donated to a unit is technically property of the unit. There are a lot of IRS rules that dance around scout accounts and if you give money back to the parent, even as a sub account/scout account line item in this nature you risk your charter organizations non-profit status due to the personal inurement regulations of the IRS.

The conflict of interest angle is an interesting point. I've heard arguments for and against. The against is pretty much the argument of having an outsider peering in can help prevent blind spots. The for has been explained to me in various ways; however, the reason that really stands out (to me) is that sometimes it takes an insider to step up as the commissioner to get the unit use to having a commissioner.

Every unit is supposed to have a commissioner; however, most councils have a hard time getting people to step up to become commissioners. In councils that do not have enough commissioners the method is to assign commissioners only to problem/struggling units. To see if you have a commissioner your key 3 should go into the my.scouting.org and check the unit dashboard to see if a unit commissioner has been assigned (it will be noted in the same panel as your unit key 3, advancement chair, etc ... . If you have not seen a commissioner in years it might be because of lack of commissioners, your unit might be viewed as high functioning, lack of responding back to commissioner contacts by your key 3, or simply your key 3 telling the commissioner that they do not want him at any meetings. My unit has a new commissioner and he attends every unit committee meeting. He basically just sits there and takes notes unless someone asks him a question. Our old commissioner disappeared and we had not seen him in like 4 years.

It's more than just POTUS signature. My council has had difficulty getting anything back from national in less than 8 weeks since the turn of the year.

I would add to this that when you get to the made for collector era of anything you need to have an eye for the very best/most desirable. In some collectables there is artificial pumping and dumping happening; however, there are items that people just keep or catch the random person eye and they snag up for a collection. If you want to make money keep an eye out for "signature" items, FOS CSPs, specialty training patches that have dates, basically anything that might indicate a limited run or some sort of way to determine first production run. Not trying to be funny, but, it is sort of comical, anything that you look at and might think, "oh that might offend so-and-so", you know that's gold, it's going to get pulled out of production somehow, people will want it because of the taboo.

The argument around this sort of thing is odd. The standard is the standard. 21 MB, so many camping nights, pass the swim test, etc ... right? This is sort of a like the old school adage that A's may pay, but C's get degrees. For the scout that goes above and beyond, fantastic, but it does not redefine the standard. The kid that does just the standard is just as much an eagle scout as any other eagle scout.

I don't know about staff size either. Based on my council the staff size is very small but the pay is high (on par for an executive in the area though). I will say that DE to CE pay gap is huge though, my understanding is that our newest DE in the council is only getting like 40k while the CE is getting 200k.

In my council all of the donation haggling seems to be done by the DE's and BOD. Might be different in other councils. My council was a total burning ship 5ish years ago based on 990 numbers. I know my CE is good at getting donations in, but I don't think he's doing it himself, I think his method is work other people to work other people.

I just checked the national map of councils which appears to have been updated 4 Dec 2024 (but does not reflect the realignment of Bay Lakes in WI and MCC in Michigan). That map shows 244 councils. If the settlement documents are binding to any degree that means we're probably looking at a council reduction of at least 100, the low end is at the floor of expectations right? If we look at the cost savings, Scouting America saves anywhere between 18 million and 28 million a year just on council executive salaries (average salary seems to be around 200k) when they merge these councils. This is some EXTREMELY low hanging fruit to find money for program for the scouts. This is just CE money we would save, we don't have good visibility on what council registrars, camping directors, etc ... make those are also all de duplicated roles in a council merger.

I ran across my councils strategic plan last night. With what I learned from it I ask the question; are toxic district and councils the product of DEI? My councils strategic plan is a decade old, about a third of it has to do with "leadership and membership reflecting all of our community" and a SOLID smidge of "we need to implement plans where 'regular units' take scoutreach units on campouts". My council has been on the chopping block for several years, we're shrinking year-over-year, every attempt to merge with a surrounding council is rebuked because no other council in our area will touch us with a ten foot pole. Is this strategic plan why no other council will work with us? Forget the reflecting our community part; how does the make regular units take scoutreach units on campouts even work with YPT and GTSS? Was it that some maniac wrote this garbage or were the early 2010s a YPT wild west?

Does that mean that we can expect multiple council mergers in the next year or two? It is my understanding that national does not want councils under 5000 youth.