Sunday, May 21st, 2023
At the Local 99 Hall
325 NE 20th Ave, Portland, OR 97232
5:30 pm – nominations and election
The purpose of this meeting is to nominate and, if necessary, hold a special election to elect a 3rd delegate to the AFM Convention, to be held June 26-29, 2023, in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Agenda
- Nominations for 3rd Delegate to the AFM Convention (June 2023).
To be nominated, a member must be in good standing and have completed all requirements for attaining full membership, i.e. attended an orientation. A member may self-nominate. If the nominee is not present at the meeting, the nominator must present a written statement of acceptance of nomination signed by the nominee.
- Election.
If more than one candidate is nominated, we will hold an election at the meeting.
Identification
Only Local 99 members are allowed to attend meetings, though the meeting attendees can vote to allow non-members. NOTE: Provisional members and members not in good standing may not vote.
Wait, didn’t we just do this??
In February, we held a special election meeting for several seats on our Executive Board, including President. The duties of the President enumerated in our bylaws include representing the Union as a Delegate to the AFM Convention. At that election meeting, Dana Rokosny was elected President.
Unfortunately, we made an error when planning for that special meeting that has affected Dana’s eligibility as a Convention Delegate. There are special AFM bylaws that lay out rules we need to follow when electing Convention Delegates; specifically, we are required to send a notice of an election by mail to all Local 99 members in good standing; we only mailed notice to members who did not receive an emailed announcement of the election meeting.
Why didn’t we mail notice to all members?
Special elections, which happen when there is a vacancy between our regularly scheduled elections, are very rare at Local 99—prior to this year, the last one took place in 1996—and it’s possible we’ve never had a special election for a Convention Delegate or, in the case of our February special election, for an officer (President) who, by virtue of their office, is a Convention Delegate. This extreme rarity is probably why no one has ever noticed until now that our Local 99 bylaws governing vacancies and special elections (Article XI, Section 5) do not comport with the AFM bylaws governing Delegate elections.
The AFM bylaws specifically state:
At least 15 days prior to the election of Delegates, notice of the election shall be mailed by the Local to the last known home address of each member in good standing. Elections in violation of this law are null and void.
For regular Local 99 elections we have a nominations meeting (which may be noticed electronically) followed by a mail ballot election, in which ballots are mailed to each member in good standing. This procedure satisfies the above AFM bylaw. For Local 99 special elections, however, we combine the nominations and election into one meeting, with our Local 99 bylaws simply requiring the Secretary-Treasurer to “mail and/or email written notice to the membership no less than fifteen days prior to the nomination and election meeting.” This procedure does NOT satisfy the above AFM bylaw. Because of this, we have been informed by the AFM that, though our President Dana Rokosny was elected properly per our Local 99 bylaws, her election as Delegate was improper and thus void.
How do we fix this?
First, we are holding a special election specifically to properly elect a 3rd Delegate to the Convention. (Our other two delegates are Mont Chris Hubbard, who serves by virtue of his election as Secretary-Treasurer, and Lars Campbell, who was elected last fall as a Convention Delegate.) Second, the Local 99 board is working on a bylaws amendment to fix the incongruity of our special elections process so that this never happens again; such an amendment would be voted on at an upcoming membership meeting.