DCI Exposed Again?

[garfield]

59 minutes ago, Ghost said:

There you have it.  It's now official.

Uhhh...

[garfield]

3 hours ago, JimF-LowBari said:

Wonder if any other conflicting rules/policies in the DCI paperwork. And if there is any that could affect non-profit status as everything better be nice and clean there. In a group that lost no -profit for a while and they did a clean up of policy as a CYA before re-applying. Well actually vague  wording of what the group did was part of the non-profit drop

I'm not convinced that anyone has shown, let alone proven, that a conflict exists.

 

[garfield]

1 hour ago, gregory11 said:

 The current DCI board has become the "Mafia" of drum corps.  What they say goes or else.!!!  

Hey, stop insulting the mafia.

(And, umm, no, you're WAY off in your comparison.  DCI is protecting the "family" of voting members that have earned inclusion, not because some Don approved of it or not.

 

[cixelsyd]

7 minutes ago, garfield said:

I'm not convinced that anyone has shown, let alone proven, that a conflict exists.

So your position is that if page 48 says "minimum of 30 performing members", while page 83 says "number of performers 55-154", there is no conflict?

[N.E. Brigand]

9 hours ago, garfield said:

Interestingly, Hitchen's Razor applies more to the OP of this thread than it does to Encorps.

What's wrong with your use of Hanlon is that it takes my use of lack of "malice" in describing DCI's actions (or lack thereof) and substitutes "stupidity" for failing in some responsibility that's only ascribed to DCI by the OP and other Encorps defenders as a defacto cause of Encorps' problem.  I think neither the Encorps post, nor the OP attempt to conflate it to a DCI issue, has made the case that DCI is culpable for Encorps not attracting 55 MM's.

I didn't say that DCI was responsible for Encorps not attracting 55 members.

I'm saying that Encorps claims to have made plans for a 2020 season that did not require them to have 55 members, and then learned, some time later, that the rules had been changed.

(As for Hitchens' aphorism, the OP quotes Encorps statement in full. Are you claiming that the OP made up the statement and Encorps didn't say that?)

Edited December 31, 2019 by N.E. Brigand

[N.E. Brigand]

9 hours ago, garfield said:

Your comparison to your fictitious Cavaliers story is invalid because 1. you presumed that DCI created, discussed, and passed a very significant rule change without ever involving Cavies in any pre-vote discussion, and 2. not one of the voting membership ever thought to contact an obviously-missing WC participant, and 3. the Cavies director never told anyone on his Board that he was going to miss the meeting and, if he did, 4. the Cavies BoD ignored the VOTING meeting that would affect them directly regardless of the issue being discussed, and 5. that the Chair of the DCI BoD would allow a vote while acknowledging at the same table that one of two (now, the ONLY) actual constituent (and a VOTING member) that would be most-directly affected by this action is missing from the table.  Five massive presumptions that don't parallel anything in the Encorps case except your insistence that responsibility lies with DCI in both cases and that, in both cases, equal attention by DCI is warranted.  

Last I checked, DCI employs an OC coordinator (named Dave who lives not far from you) who, from my own experience, is highly qualified and attentive to the groups seeking qualification to perform on the WC stage.  Do you presume some mistake was made by him, too, or that all culpability lies with the ED's office?  Occam applies here, too. 

Encorps says that they didn't know about the 55-member rule change in October until after it happened and after they were well under way in making plans for 2020, and that DCI was unresponsive to Encorps' inquiries about whether that rule would apply to them in 2020. It's right there in their statement quoted in the first post of this thread.

I merely lay out two possibilities:

1. Encorps is telling the truth, in which case, If that's true, someone at DCI dropped the ball. If you want to assign that responsibility to David Eddleman in Avon Lake rather than Dan Acheson in Indianapolis, that's fair. I have no animus toward Acheson or anyone else at DCI, and I agree with you that the staff and coordinators merely carry out the wishes of DCI's member corps. But if Encorps is telling the truth, they were treated unfairly.

(I don't buy the argument that DCI has no responsibility to clearly communicate big important news like a required change in membership size to Open Class corps.)

2. Encorps is lying. In that case, I would agree that we should assume DCI did nothing wrong.

[Jeff Ream]

3 hours ago, IllianaLancerContra said:

Do you really think if Boston had folded in 1983 du to lack of sufficient numbers they would still be around today?

thats not the point. dci has changed tremendously since 1983. 36 year old comparisons mean nothing now.

[Jeff Ream]

1 hour ago, gregory11 said:

 The current DCI board has become the "Mafia" of drum corps.  What they say goes or else.!!!  

how you doin?

[N.E. Brigand]

7 hours ago, cixelsyd said:

I think you are still missing my point.  Let me put this in terms you can relate to ($$$).

Say you had a 401k retirement savings account you accumulated while with a previous employer.  Say you decided last week to close that account, and roll it over into an IRA so as not to incur any taxes at this time.  You know this is legal because the law is in writing; it is not changing any time soon because laws require majorities of both houses of Congress and a presidential signoff to change; and it is typical in a relatively free/fair nation to provide fair warning time between ratification and when the new law takes effect.  But today, some government website changes a document to say that rollovers are now illegal, and anyone currently attempting a rollover will have all their funds seized by the government.  They take all your money.  Any complaints?

So to answer your question - no, I would not be "satisfied".  DCI changed a policy document in conflict with their own rules manual, and in ignorance of their own rule change process.  I would already be dissatisfied if the minimum size rule changes ratified in January 2020 were not deferred until the 2021 season... but if some unauthorized subset of DCI can make up the rules whenever they want, I would have no choice but to recommend that anyone with fiduciary responsibilities at a non-member corps cut their losses and get out while they still can.

You also asked about changing the outcome for Encorps.  If DCI went ahead with this change, but for 2021 implementation, Encorps could still have proceeded with the 2020 season without the 55-member angst.  It would, of course, still be up to them to take that opportunity and make it a success.

This reminds me of something that actually happened two years ago.

A significant overhaul to the U.S. tax code, totaling some 4,000 pages of text, was passed by Congress and signed into law in December 2017. Like a number of other bills over the years --i.e., I'm not picking on any one political party here-- it was crafted by a small number of legislators and then presented to Congress as a whole just a couple days after the bill was made available to them for consideration. They voted for it (or against it) without having time to read it or understand its full implications.

One thing the law did, in exchange for giving companies certain tax breaks, was to take away another smaller tax break they had received for many years for providing their employees with parking (or other transportation, e.g. bus passes).

What no one realized, not even the people who voted for it, was that because of the way the law was written, this meant that non-profit companies who provided parking for their employees, companies that didn't pay taxes in the first place and thus couldn't receive this tax break, now had to pay a 21% penalty if they continued to provide this benefit.

And that was effective January 1, 2018. And it applied to all non-profits, from arts companies (like DCI) to social service organizations to churches.

But it took until about April 2018 before non-profits started hearing this news from their accountants. (I don't think it was mentioned in any major media outlet until June.) In the area where the non-profit I work for is lcoatedd, which had provided employees with parking for years, the cost was more than $1,000 per person per year. So if a non-profit here had 50 employees, and they were paying $50,000 per year for those employees' parking, they would now be on the line for more than $10,000 in taxes each year.

(If the non-profit owned its own lot where employees parked, it had to calculate the market value of the spaces in its lot.)

Many of those non-profits quickly made new plans. For example, some companies gave their employees raises equal to what they'd been paying for parking and told them they'd have to find their own parking going forward. But those companies were already liable for taxes for parking provided during the first several months of the year.

Now I have heard that Congress will be passing a new law to fix this problem. Once it goes into effect, the tax will go away for non-profits who wish to provide this parking, *and* they'll be getting a refund for the taxes they paid due to the change. Great!

But in the case of Encorps, at least, no such retroactive move would save their 2020 season.

 

[N.E. Brigand]

1 hour ago, gregory11 said:

 The current DCI board has become the "Mafia" of drum corps.  What they say goes or else.!!!  

I'm critical of this particular decision, but I don't agree at all with your characterization. I feel that for the most part, DCI's board and leadership is trying to do what it believes is best for the activity as a whole. They make mistakes, that's all.