Today is another meeting of the ACBL Advisory Council, formerly the Board of Governors.
ACBL Funding for Units: The 5-5-5 Plan
Executive Director Bronia Jenkins outlined the new 5-5-5 plan focused on membership recruitment and retention.
In the past, all ACBL units received 11% of a member’s annual dues. That is, of the $49 per year you pay in dues to ACBL, a little more than $5 goes to your unit. For NYC, we have 2429 active members in Unit 155, giving us $13,092.32 a year of funding paid quarterly. We then lose approximately that amount sponsoring regionals.
Starting Q2 0f 2024, the money paid to Units will be based on a sliding scale from 5% to 15%, depending on how actively the Units fulfill their membership recruitment and retention goals. First, all units receive 5% no matter what (down from 11%). Then, units receive another 5% for retention and another 5% for recruitment. They have some fancy new software to monitor how each unit is doing, although for now it’s a complicated dashboard that is hard to read. More instructions to follow, I’m sure. Thankfully, for Q1 2024 all units still receive their usual 11%.
Conflicting Tournament Sanctions
The ACBL Board of Directors passed a new motion detailing procedures for determining and resolving conflicting tournaments. The gist is, no two sectionals may be held within 200 miles of each other, and no two regionals may be held within 400 miles of each other. There use as the crows flies miles, not driving distance.
For Unit 155, we always try our best to cooperate with our neighbors in New Jersey, Tarrytown, and New England who often hold tournaments. The 200 and 400 miles distance might find us conflicting with a lot more New England tournaments, but in practice we would normally avoid trying to hold any regional during any of their regionals. Things get more complicated when we consider GNTs, NAPs, and STaCs. Does one flight of GNTs conflicting with the final Sunday of their sectional count as a disallowed conflict?
Pending Litigation – 3 Lawsuits
Unfortunately, ACBL is currently in the middle of 3 separate lawsuits.
First is the ongoing class action lawsuit between ACBL Directors and ACBL, and whether or not they qualified for overtime, hourly pay, or exempt salaried pay, and various labor law considerations.
Second, there is an emotional distress lawsuit between a former Advisor Council member and ACBL after being disciplined for inappropriate behavior and body language on a zoom call.
Third, the Sheraton host hotel for the Phoenix 2022 NABC is suing ACBL for some dispute in the contract’s attrition clause. Not enough players booked rooms in the host hotel, and somewhere along the way the hotel and ACBL had a disagreement about how to handle the attrition that spiraled into a lawsuit.
Advisory Council Meeting and Bylaws
Procedures and bylaws problems are never fun, but given how much the group has changed post-pandemic, there was a discussion of whether Advisory Council meetings should be held later, after a full preparation of meeting minutes and results from the ACBL Board of Directors meeting (that’s the smaller meeting of the 13 regional directors and ACBL Management, think of it has the senate while advisory council is the house of representatives).
Apparently, our bylaws now require meetings are held electronically on Zoom, in conjunction with the NABC tournaments. Although “in conjunction” is somewhat ambiguous, the AC chair believes it should be held on the final Sunday of NABCs at the latest. However, for the next NABCs, people will try to informally organize a chance for some face-to-face meetings.