[Lnc-business] Emergency email ballot to move LP HQ

[Daniel Wiener]

This is a heads-up to the LNC that I expect to shortly be asking for
co-sponsors for an email ballot to immediately relocate our headquarters to
North Dakota.  This matter is extremely urgent, for the following reasons:

You may already have read on Twitter the sad news that Wyoming Knott passed
away early this morning, after she fell 60 feet from the top of a fracking
drilling rig.  Wyoming Knott is of course better known as the "North Dakota
Fracking Queen" and was an ardent advocate for personal liberties. She was
an uncompromising individual who demanded total freedom from any state
interference in the booming fracking industry.  She will be sorely missed,
and our heartfelt condolences go out to her family and friends and the
entire fracking community.

Back in 2003, Ms. Knott apparently altered her will to bequeath a quarter
of her estate to the Libertarian Party.  At the time her estate consisted
primarily of undeveloped land near Williston, North Dakota worth an
estimated $375,000.  A quarter of that ($93,750) was certainly a generous
amount even back then.  Today, as a consequence of development of the
Bakken Shale Formation which underlies it, that land has appreciated
enormously, with a November, 2014 appraisal coming in at just over $6
billion.  That would put the value of her bequest to the Libertarian Party
at $1.5 billion, although that may have since declined to about $900
million due to the drop in oil prices.

However, Ms. Knott detested everything connected with Washington, D.C.,
including the fact that the LP's office was located there.  So she added a
codicil to that bequest that it would only be effective if the Libertarian
Party's office was located in North Dakota, which to her represented the
cultural and ideological opposite of Washington, D.C.  She believed that
removing the Libertarian Party from the center of government corruption
would help it avoid the inevitable rot.

One possibility is that we could challenge that condition in court.  But
let's be realistic.  Regardless of whether the eventual value is $1.5
billion or $900 million or somewhere in between, there will be scores of
lawyers crawling out of the woodwork, anxious to do everything possible to
deny us that bequest, if they can cobble together even the slightest
pretext.  So the sooner we can move our headquarters to North Dakota to
prove we are complying with her codicil, the better.

Again, time is of the essence.  If all LNC members immediately vote on the
upcoming email ballot, we ought to be able to complete it by the end of
today.  In the meantime, our Executive Director can fly to North Dakota and
rent a temporary office to get us started, until we can construct a major
new high-rise office building.  (It's been suggested that it be named the
Wyoming Knott Memorial Office Building, and my response is "why not"?).  If
all this gets finished today (on the same day as her death, April 1, 2015)
I think it will greatly strengthen our legal position.

Daniel Wiener
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