Majority's Spokesman Opposes Limiting Number of Years Directors Can Serve; Claims "New Board Members Won't Understand Issues."

At the LPCA's "community forum" held on Wednesday, January 21st, the spokesman for the ruling Board majority and one of its members, LPCA director Kearse McGill, spoke publicly at the conclusion of the "forum" about the governance reforms proposed by LPCA Renaissance. After quickly conceding that the LPCA Board should be increased in size (reform #1) and that the director nomination process should be democratized (reform #2), Mr. McGill - a 10-year member of the LPCA board - spoke out strongly against enacting any limits on the number of years that a director could hold office.

Mr McGill said that the LPCA needs to keep its long-time board members in place because "new board members won't understand the issues facing Land Park."

A recent respondent wrote to us to say that she found Mr. McGill's statement "just plain sad."

We believe that Mr. McGill's statement discloses an air of arrogant superiority that has, regrettably, become part of the mind set of long-time LPCA directors who have ruled the LPCA with no real oversight or accountability for many years. It also reveals an elitist disdain for the views and intelligence of Land Park residents. For Mr. McGill to dismiss Land Park residents who run for the LPCA Board and who are then democratically elected by the members in competitive elections as "new board members" who "won't understand the issues facing Land Park" is an insult to both the community-minded residents who choose to run and to the LPCA members who elect them. It also reveals a great deal about Mr. McGill's and his long-time LPCA colleagues' "understanding" of the democratic process.