[Lnc-business] Email Ballot 2017-06: Move Archive Records to CO

Mon Mar 27 08:01:54 EDT 2017

And it would not happen under my oversight either.  Whether spelled out or
not, that is an LNC level decision and I treat it as such.  I would like to
make recommendations to the LNC however.

On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 5:40 AM, Ken Moellman <lpky at mu-net.org> wrote:

> Destruction of documents without LNC permission would have been strictly
> prohibited under the version of the HPC motion that was originally brought
> forward.  I'm just sayin'.
>
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2017 at 12:19 AM, Caryn Ann Harlos <
> carynannharlos at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Nothing would be unilaterally discarded by me.
>>
>> I do not believe the HPC has that authority.
>>
>> A detailed culling recommendation would be given.
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Mar 26, 2017 at 5:35 PM Starchild <sfdreamer at earthlink.net>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Alicia,
>>>
>>> If there were an amendment or second motion that none of the materials
>>> to be sent to Colorado be discarded without an elected or appointed member
>>> of the party leadership gives the okay, would that  allay your concerns? Or
>>> perhaps a motion/amendment saying certain categories of things can't be
>>> discarded, period? Having seen the kind of stuff that's sometimes been left
>>> behind and thrown away after LP conventions – current outreach materials,
>>> unused office supplies, etc. – not to mention stuff being deleted from our
>>> website, old meeting minutes and other important records apparently having
>>> been thrown out by people at various times, etc., I share your concern that
>>> things might get thrown out which would better be saved.
>>>
>>> Where we may possibly see things differently is that I don't perceive
>>> there being a greater risk of this occurring in Colorado than in
>>> Alexandria. The discarding of minutes and other important past materials
>>> presumably took place in the D.C. area. More recently, Wes mentioned in a
>>> recent message that he discarded some stuff, and although I trust there
>>> were no minutes among those materials, there wasn't a lot of detail
>>> provided about precisely what they *did* include, and I can't help
>>> wondering whether anything was discarded that I personally might have kept.
>>> I might have the same concern upon hearing of stuff discarded in Colorado,
>>> of course, but I wouldn't be any *more* concerned.
>>>
>>> Love & Liberty,
>>>                                 ((( starchild )))
>>> At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
>>>                               (415) 625-FREE
>>>                                 @StarchildSF
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mar 26, 2017, at 2:16 PM, Alicia Mattson wrote:
>>>
>>> The discussion on this thread paints the motion in a very different
>>> light for me.  I want to take a step back and put this in context.
>>>
>>> The motion adopted by email ballot to create this committee included the
>>> following scope description:
>>>
>>> "The LNC establishes a Historic Preservation Committee to help preserve
>>> and publish historical documents of the party and to manage LPedia."
>>>
>>> The goal is to preserve and publish things of historical value.
>>>
>>> This motion suggests that the newly-requested funds will be used:
>>>
>>> "to budget an additional $5,000 (budget line 90) to relocate the
>>>
>>> historical records in the Duke Street basement and in the off-site
>>>
>>> storage facility to a location in Colorado..."
>>>
>>> That to me sounds like the materials in question are of historical
>>> value, and it thus warrants the expenditure to preserve them.
>>>
>>> What we're learning, though, is that possibly the vast majority of this
>>> material is trash, and we're paying thousands of dollars to ship trash to
>>> Colorado to be thrown away there.
>>>
>>> This is really more of a document destruction project than a historical
>>> preservation project, though along the way it will likely find a few
>>> historical documents worth preserving.
>>>
>>> We created a Historic Perservation Committee, rather than a Basement
>>> Cleanout Committee, and they're very different tasks.
>>>
>>> I would be comfortable with volunteers in Colorado taking things deemed
>>> to have historic value and scanning them for preservation, or making them
>>> available for silent auction fundraising, etc.
>>>
>>> I am not comfortable with volunteers in Colorado who have no experience
>>> in operations of our headquarters essentially making decisions about what
>>> documents get thrown away.
>>>
>>> The reason I spent a day in the Watergate dungeon (I think it was in the
>>> fall of 2011) digging through that material is because I was looking for
>>> some records that should have been preserved in perpetuity, but *someone
>>> who didn't understand their importance apparently threw them out*. They
>>> actually had very high value for legal reasons.
>>>
>>> As pretty as it sounds to have a team of volunteers in the birthplace of
>>> the LP building historical archives, a person's Colorado residence doesn't
>>> grant them magical knowledge of what business records ought to be kept and
>>> which ones ought to be thrown away.
>>>
>>> I realize that you say that the LNC will ultimately decide which things
>>> get tossed, but the quality of the LNC's decision depends heavily on the
>>> description of the records we are given.  If a volunteer describes to us
>>> that a box contains miscellaneous receipts, it's one thing if it's
>>> 15-year-old receipts for office supplies that have long since been used up,
>>> but it's another if the receipts are for equipment still in use today and
>>> maybe still under warranty.  If a volunteer describes to us that a box
>>> contains old email correspondence with a state chair, it's one thing if the
>>> conversation was, "I look forward to seeing you at the convention", but
>>> it's another thing if the conversation was relaying facts about a situation
>>> that is the subject of a lawsuit.
>>>
>>> If the person looking at the records doesn't really understand the
>>> context of the records, how can they give us the key information we need to
>>> make an informed decision about which ones to throw away?
>>>
>>> This is not a project that should be undertaken by people with no
>>> understanding of our party operations.
>>>
>>> There may also be old employment records with sensitive personnel
>>> information, social security numbers, etc., and those shouldn't just be
>>> passed around among random volunteers.
>>>
>>> I have no objection to paying for the committee chair to make a trip to
>>> the storage facility, spend a few days sorting through it to find items of
>>> historical value, and then shipping those 10 boxes to Colorado for further
>>> processing.  That is within the function of a Historic Preservation
>>> Committee.
>>>
>>> I do have objection to shipping our trash-mixed-with-important-records
>>> across the country for people who don't understand what is valuable and
>>> what isn't to give us vague descriptions which will be the basis of
>>> uninformed decisions for destroying our records.  This document destruction
>>> task is not what I had in mind when the Historic Preservation Committee was
>>> created.
>>>
>>> For several years our outside auditors have been urging us to adopt
>>> document retention policies (and also whistleblower policies, but that's
>>> another subject).  I think it was two terms ago near the end of that term
>>> that the Audit Committee proposed some starter language to try to get the
>>> ball rolling, but the LNC has not yet implemented anything.
>>>
>>> At minimum we need to establish how long certain records are to be kept
>>> such as employment records, financial records, membership certifications,
>>> and other categories.  These can be important to keep for legal reasons,
>>> for FEC compliance, etc.  Even after we make those policy decisions, I
>>> think the document maintenance has to be done by knowledgeable insiders
>>> rather than miscellaneous volunteers.
>>>
>>> -Alicia
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>>>
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>>>
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-- 
*In Liberty,*
*Caryn Ann Harlos*
Region 1 Representative, Libertarian National Committee (Alaska, Arizona,
Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Washington) - Caryn.Ann.
Harlos at LP.org <Caryn.Ann.Harlos at LP.org>
Communications Director, Libertarian Party of Colorado
<http://www.lpcolorado.org>
Colorado State Coordinator, Libertarian Party Radical Caucus
<http://www.lpradicalcaucus.org>
Chair, LP Historical Preservation Committee

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