Your recharter date is determined by the BSA. Normally, all units in a Council will recharter at the same time.

(Historically, you rechartered in the month your unit was founded - this was discontinued in the 90s.)

Of course, the online recharter system was open in early November (around the 3rd) for units that rechartered 12/31 -- so that certainly is a lot of advance time you could do your recharter (talking like 8 weeks).

Oh, I've tried starting 10 weeks in advance and I got no further ahead with responses than when I started 2 weeks in advance. So this year, I didn't start until after Thanksgiving. Things are moving twice as fast. Where it took 11 weeks to get confirmation from 80% of the youth last year, it's only taken 3.

Last year, I had one adult procrastinate with YPT because she didn't think it didn't matter. It took clear into January for her to understand that she was holding the rest of the crew hostage! (She was sincerely apologetic, for what it's worth.) I don't expect that problem, because I made sure my key leaders were caught up, and I'm dropping any adult without up-to-date YPT.

But before last week, I was frustrated, nobody besides my son came to the meeting where we were collecting dues, only one youth had responded to repeated E-mails and FB posts, and I was beginning to wonder with my DE if I would have enough paid youth to make a crew.

Still, I'm missing today's deadline. Money's not in. Even if it was, the treasurer is collecting her son from college.

It's a vicious cycle. We spend so much time counting members (and, thanks to YPT, herding adults), we don't get program done. And ski season is the busiest part of our year! This month would be better served by promoting our trips. Figuring out who's in and who's out, for us, would be better done in March or June.

Somehow newspapers, magazines, internet services, cell phone companies and a lot of other businesses with annual renewals have figured out how to do this without funneling the process through one individual for every few dozen members.

So the UNIT recharters by signing the annual recharter form and mailing a check. Why can't individual members, at that point, pay their dues and renew their "subscriptions" online? I can't think of a single issue which couldn't be overcome electronically.

Funny how BSA started out as essentially a means of selling books and magazines to boys. You wanna bet if that were still a substantial portion of the revenue we would have the world's slickest renewal system?

Talk to the Powers that be. Charters can be shorter or longer than 12 months, up to 18 months if memory serves.