This past autumn, the Board of Governors (BOG) and Water Pollution Control Authority (WPCA) wrestled several organizational and composition issues resulting from BOG oversights in appointments to both boards. In light of that experience, a small group of current and former officers, governors, and WPCA members assembled to discuss how best to avoid repeating such missteps in the future.
They agree to the following principles in guiding their changes:
- Ensure the WPCA Ordinance offers consistency with the Charter and ByLaws
- Restore power to the Membership at-large by having WPCA members directly elected
- Minimize the concentration of power by limiting the overlap between boards to no more than two members
- Reflect the state statutes’ empowerment and duties of the WPCA
The original ordinance derived from the Point of Woods WPCA establishing ordinance, rather than being cleanly written from our founding documents. This resulted in some inconsistencies between how the WPCA was structured and operated in comparison to our BOG. By making the suggested amendments, we can more closely align both the structure and operations of the WPCA with our founding documents.
Consider this extreme case – under the existing ordinance, the BOG could appoint four of its members to the WPCA and have a voting majority of the WPCA. At that point, the WPCA would effectively be captive to the BOG and they would operate as one single entity in practice. By empowering the membership to elect the WPCA board members, the members’ concerns and preferences with regard to the infrastructure project can be directly expressed independent of general association business.
The proposed amendment embedded below offers the best efforts of the working group that assembled it. We invite you to comment and suggest revisions, so that we can deliver improved governance to our association.
Respectfully,
The WPCA Amendment Working Group
- John Cunningham, WPCA Treasurer & Former Governor
- Dede DeRosa, WPCA Secretary
- Diane Duhaime, OLSBA President
- Paul Graml, WPCA Board Member, Former Governor & Former OLSBA President
- Al Roy, WPCA Chairman & Past Governor
- Greg Symon, WPCA Vice Chairman & Governor