from	Rene Greff 
to	JHieftje@a2gov.org,
ssmith@a2gov.org,
Sbriere@a2gov.org,
SRapundalo@a2gov.org,
TDerezinski@a2gov.org,
CTaylor@a2gov.org,
LGreden@a2gov.org,
MHiggins@a2gov.org,
MTeall@a2gov.org,
CHohnke@a2gov.org,
MAnglin@a2gov.org
date	Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 5:46 AM
subject	DDA Bylaws
	
	

Dear Mayor and Council,

As I prepare for the first meeting of the newly appointed Ypsilanti
DDA which will be adopting new bylaws, I have been referencing the Ann
Arbor DDA bylaws and was reminded of some outstanding business.  You
may not all be aware of the fact that the Ann Arbor DDA attempted to
amend our bylaws recently to increase transparency, clarify roles and
responsibilities and ensure a more democratic process.  We also made a
very important clarification that no single officer has the ability to
unilaterally direct the staff without board approval.  We were
prompted to make this clarification after the second incident of a DDA
chair taking it upon himself to instruct the executive director to
undertake an expensive project without the consent of the board –
which put the director in a very untenable position.  We wanted to
change the language about the election of officers to ensure that the
decision-making power would remain distributed among the board rather
than consolidated in the power of the chair who serves a purely
ceremonial function on our board.  We also wanted the bylaws to
accurately reflect the way we had actually been conducting business
for the past decade.


We spent months in committee drafting language that accomplished these
goals and this language was passed by our full board and sent to
council for approval.  Then for purely political reasons Leigh Greden
managed to get council to table the resolution by convincing people
that it was somehow a power grab by Susan Pollay, when in fact, it was
in response to a power grab by one of our board members who made an
unreasonable and bad judgment call based on his personal agenda,
declared that there was no time to inform the executive committee of
his request, made a statement to the press in his role as chair
committing the DDA to this course of action,  and then assured the
director that failure to comply immediately with his request would be
considered another example of obstructionist behavior.  I hope you can
see why the board felt it would be prudent to clarify in our bylaws
that that chair possesses no special powers and that no director has
the authority to act unilaterally or direct the staff on behalf of the
authority.


I am hoping that those of you who were not involved in the debate the
last time around will take a minute to read over the changes – there
are only a couple, you can probably read through it in 5 minutes, and
you’ll see that the changes are very straight-forward and innocuous
and should make intuitive sense to anyone who values transparency and
the democratic process.

 

Since I am no longer serving on the DDA (or won’t be by our next
meeting in September) I bring this to your attention simply because I
believe in good governance and feel these changes will strengthen and
protect the DDA regardless of its membership.

 

Thanks for your time.

 

Rene

 

Rene Greff