[Lnc-business] The Libertarian Party only has 2 full-time staffers?!

[Starchild]

	Maybe I just haven't been paying attention. That's what LP operations manager Robert Kraus suggested when I spoke with him today and expressed surprise at his statement that he and Wes Benedict are the only paid staff working full time at our office. He said that if I'd read the report Wes presented at the last LNC meeting, I would have been aware of the situation. 

	Robert told me this by way of explaining why he has not yet sent the LNC the details of how much we are paying for hotel meeting space, food and beverage obligations, staff airline flights, shipping costs, etc., in connection with LNC meetings. At the last LNC meeting in Pittsburgh in April, he told me in response to my asking him for this information that he would send it within a week or so. When I spoke with him today, he said that if I wanted him to stop what he was doing and send the information now, he would have to stop working on updating donor information to help us raise money, because he was the only person in the office right now. When I asked whether he could get us the meeting information prior to the next LNC meeting on August 19 (over 2 months from now, and 4 months from when he originally said he'd provide it), his response was "possibly".

	We have 11 people listed on our staff page (https://www.lp.org/staff/), not even counting individuals like our legal counsel and our FEC consultant who are kind of "on call", and although political director Carla Howell's contract wasn't renewed, the chair recently proposed adding an additional lower-level staffer. With that many folks on the roster, I don't understand why the two highest-paid individuals on staff are the only ones who are being paid full-time salaries and asked to staff the office largely by themselves. If this is true, it means that our highest-paid staffers are likely spending a significant part of their time doing routine office tasks like answering phone calls which could be handled by lower-paid staffers or even by volunteers.

	Robert did say he agreed with me that staff should not be asked to monitor or be involved in the party's social media outreach, which would potentially take a lot of their time away from other tasks. I also suggested that volunteers, instead of staff, could be the ones to research LNC meeting locations and present options to the LNC. Local activists in the cities where we're considering holding meetings would be the logical people to do this. If we don't have any local activists in a particular area able to help us find free or low-cost meeting venues there and help with details such as coordinating local transportation and folks able to host out-of-town visitors, it would beg the question of why we are meeting in that location instead of somewhere there is an active local Libertarian organization that can support us and which we in turn can support by seeking to arrange to have visiting LNC members make press appearances, attend local campaign events, do fundraising, etc., while in town. 

	But if what Robert says is correct, it seems to me that we are not running our office efficiently. It also seems to me that LNC members being made to wait months and months after an LNC meeting to see what the actual expenses were for that meeting is unreasonable. Actually, we should be seeing such expenses listed before each meeting, since expenses like hotel meeting space fees, food and beverage obligations, staff airline flights, and shipping costs are in most cases known in advance. And we should be seeing estimates of these costs prior to even making a decision on where to meet, since such costs ought to factor into our decisions.

Love & Liberty,

                                     ((( starchild )))
At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
                          RealReform at earthlink.net
                                  (415) 625-FREE

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