ENA Conference/General Assembly Opening in Baltimore

Wednesday October 7.
8:00am

ENA president Bill Briggs called the General Assembly to order for 2010 here in Baltimore MD.
Many new and interesting things were on tap for starters.

One of the first "improvements" was the installation of a new method for registering keypads for the delegates to vote with. Previous years had seen difficulties with delegate registration, missing keypads, DUPLICATE keypads, keypads being "swapped" etc. So it was with a bit of trepidation that we installed a new vendor/service for this and a new process for registering keypads. Overall it seems to be like a good system and some inefficiencies since last year have been improved upon... so far. ...we'll see!

The second part of the morning session saw some emotional debate and speaking regarding one of the new proposed bylaws which is going to effectively "cap" the number of delegates to the general assembly.

This had been proposed by ENA leadership for several reasons, one of which was a financial concern in that larger and larger delegate assemblies was becoming a logistical chore, as well as expenses to the organization were increasing as well. The ENA leadership had proposed a fixed number of delegates and each state would be awarded a respective percentage based upon their annual membership.

Good --- Bad???

Much discourse was had throughout the assembly, many people voiced their opinions both for and against. Some of the larger states voiced concerns that their representation might be diluted by the smaller states getting their "guaranteed" delegates based on small ENA member rolls. Other speakers voiced concerns about the principles of "grassroots", "membership driven" as their speaking points and they advocated for the current method using arbitrary ratios, such as is the current case.

The discussion went on and nearly ran into lunch time and discussion had to be halted temporarily.

As for this author, I am not completely convinced on my own stance on this. I understand the need to limit some of the expenses and the ever increasing logistical burden, however I also understand that, as a "pure" representative organization that is growing, a stable delegate:member ratio, despite increasing numbers, has it's benefits also.

Will be interesting to see how this one pans out.