Annual General Mild (CAMRA Branch Meeting #4)

I didn’t write anything about meeting #3 as nothing really happened, however, it did give rise to an amusing and interesting email exchange. After each meeting the minutes are typed up and emailed to all members and a copy is also sent to the regional director. Each set of minutes always close by stating when the next business meeting is… our next meeting was also scheduled to be the AGM. The date for the AGM had been advertised in the branch newsletter since late in 2011 and had also been detailed on the branch website for just as long. Sadly, the regional director, emailed to say that this wasn’t good enough and reminded us of the CAMRA Articles of Faith which insist that all AGMs must be announced at least four weeks in advance and the only true ways to do this were in What’s Brewing or by individually writing to all members (we have over 600). We’d missed the deadline date for What’s Brewing submissions by one day so the only uncostly option was to reschedule! Understandably, a few of my branch comrades weren’t happy about this and fired off a slew of angry emails that effectively said CAMRA rules on this matter were pretty pathetic. a load of emails were exchanged and with each one the regional director got more defensive and the branch members got more irate… I was sure it was only a couple of exchanges away from descending into petty name calling but thankfully/unfortunately at all remained fairly professional. A couple of days later the regional director emailed to say that as long as the CAMRA Politburo didn’t object he would allow us to have our AGM on the date we’d announced more than four months previously.

The AGM came round and the regional director (who usually attends AGMs) announced that he would not be in attendance – possibly he thought he’d get too much (friendly) abuse. Each committee member gave a brief overview of the year and reeled of a list of people they felt deserved a special mention. The finance secretary announced that we’d finished the year in profit and as such we’d ‘donated’ a reasonable chunk of cash to HQ – CAMRA rules state that profits must be donated to HQ but the flip side of this is that should a branch incur a loss HQ will cover it for them.

With the reviews over it was time to ‘elect’ our officials for the coming year. Everybody (bar one) was happy to continue with their role and nobody chose to stand against them but still somebody had to nominate each person and then somebody had to second them and then everybody had to raise their hand to show they were in agreement. I didn’t raise my hand for the first election and was politely asked if everything was okay. This process was carried out for all 12 roles. Rules state that somebody must be appointed to each role even if branch members deem it an unnecessary role and rules also state that everyone must be nominated and seconded and voted in by all present. If it wasn’t for archaic rules the process would’ve been over in less than a minute: Anyone want to stand down? No! Anyone new want to stand? No! Everyone happy with that? Yes! Sorted. Thankfully it didn’t drag on for too long, which I was told wouldn’t have been the case if the regional director had been running the show. And then it was time for half-time refreshment before getting on with a few other items that weren’t covered by the AGM.

Next meeting is scheduled for Monday the 14th of May – I’ll be there… fresh from my exploits at the Copenhagen Beer Celebration!

Ammendment (16 Nov 12): I didn’t make it to the May meeting and I haven’t been to a meeting since the AGM… it’s highly doubtful that I’ll attend another.

~ by landells on April 19, 2012.