The Reform Proposals of the LPCA Renaissance

After a collaborative assessment of the LPCA's needs, LPCA Renaissance has crafted the following set of initial reforms to bring fundamental change to the LPCA:


1. Increase the Size of the Board of Directors. Since its formation, the LPCA has had 10 or fewer directors. Since board members have principal responsibility for the work that LPCA takes on, the current board size severely limits the projects and work that the LPCA can take on. Comparable community-based organizations in our area have much larger boards, such as the highly effective Sierra-Curtis Neighborhood Association serving Curtis Park which has a 23-member board (Sierra Curtis Neighborhood Association-Information).


An expansion of the board also assures the presentation of broader viewpoints and will serve to infuse the LPCA with new enthusiasm and energy. It will also reduce the liklihood of a small cohort of board members exercising excessive control over the affairs and governance of the LPCA and will encourage board members to reach decisions by consensus. Finally, the reconstituted board of the LPCA should always have an odd number of directors, not the current even number of directors (10) that has resulted in several deadlocked tie votes on important issues and initiatives.

2. Enact Term Limits for Board Members. All those who serve or have served on non-profit boards know that every volunteer board member has an inherent "sell buy" date, the point at which a given director has largely exhausted his or her energy level and his or her resevoir of fresh new ideas. It is also the point at which volunteer directors become habituated to past routines and develop a certain resistance to change and to new ideas. Good boardmanship requires that there be mechanisms in place to assure that good board members do not become "stale" in place and do not impede the consideration of fresh ideas and solutions. Organizations are also vulnerable to domination by long-term board members who have an informational advantage enabling them to entrench and resist the efforts of newer board members who seek reform or change.

The current LPCA is a case book study of an organization that has been long dominated by an entrenched cadre of long-tenured directors, three of whom have served a total of more than 50 years on the LPCA board. Earlier this year, in a highly-publized schism, four LPCA directors resigned en mass in protest of the resolute resistance of this entrenched group to change. When five new directors where elected this spring to take their place, the pattern repeated itself. One of the five new directors resigned in September in protest and the remaining four are now stymied in their efforts to bring about change. If the reform proposals are not enacted by the LPCA membership, there is a good chance that three of the four new board members will be effectively ousted this spring by the LPCA Nominations Committee, which is dominated by the three most entrenched directors. Land Park can no longer afford to have its premier community organization serve as the personal fiefdom of a small handful of deeply entrenched individuals.

3. Change the role of Nominations Committee into a Conduit for Information Submitted by Board Candidates to LPCA members. Under the current LPCA bylaws, the Nominations Committee nominates a slate of candidates that are presented to the membership at each annual membership. Historically, this slate of nominees has always, without exception, been rubber-stamped by the vote of those LPCA members who take the time to attend the annual meeting. The established protocol of the board has been to renominate compliant incumbent directors who wish to continue to serve, effectively locking in the current incumbents and turning a nominally democratic governing body into a de facto self-perpetuating board.


We propose that the Nominations Committee be changed into an "Elections Committee" which will gather information from those interested in serving as LPCA directors, package that information into an uniform format and then communicate that information to all LPCA members. With this change, the Nominations Committee will no longer serve as a vehicle for protecting entrenched directors but will, instead, serve as a means of democratizing the LPCA and opening up its director election process.