bylaws

As you can imagine, there’s been a flurry of activity this past week regarding the ARRL board’s proposal to change Bylaw 46. Last Thursday, for example, RATPAC hosted a discussion on the proposed changes. The presentation was headed by Marty Woll, N6VI, a former ARRL vice director. Below is a recording of that discussion.

Several of the directors that seemingly plan to vote for this bylaw change have issued statements. Fred Hopengarten, Esq., K1VR, Past New England Director, responds to some of those statements in a recently-published document.

The most common point put forth by the supporters is that there is nothing new in the proposed changes. Of course, the first thing that comes to mind is that if there’s nothing new, then why bother to change it? Hopengarten takes this a step further, though, writing:

It is true that there are some bad policies from the prior bylaw that are carried forward into the Proposed ByLaw 46. We’ll look at them. To find bad policies that are not new means only that a bad policy has been carried forward.

He goes on to show not only how some of the new policies are damaging, but how some of the old policies should be changed as well. The tl;dr version of this is that this new bylaw will make secrecy the order of the day, or at least that’s how it seems to K1VR and me.

I’ll conclude this blog post exactly how Hopengarten concludes his, “Please ask your director to vote no on Proposed ByLaw 46.” In the end, it’s not going to be good for the ARRL or amateur radio.

UPDATE January 12, 202

Fred Kemmerer, AB1OC, the New England Division Director hosted an online “town hall” on Wednesday, January 10. At the town hall, Kristen McIntyre, K6WX, the Pacific Division Director, gave a presentation on the proposed bylaws change. She was one of the directors that drafted the proposal. You can view a recording of the meeting at https://nediv.arrl.org/2024/01/11/town-hall-recap-january-10-2024/.