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T2Eagle

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Everything posted by T2Eagle

  1. There's a pretty big divergence in operations between councils. I find my own pros to be just that, professional, and generally outstanding. I will say money is where they are the funniest, I think because they never can relax about it because they don't have a dedicated income stream the way national does with registration, so it feels like the wolf is always at the door. My guess is that there will be some questionable actions in some councils, but I suspect what will most often happen is that things will become more bureaucratic and annoying, especially in comparison to the near tota
  2. So there's a lot of misunderstanding about the idea of "liability". From council's point of view their liability, and their risk, is based on their actions. If they are negligent in some action they take or fail to take they will be held liable for that action and damages based on that will be paid from their assets. Whether the CO has or doesn't have assets doesn't affect their risk. In the new model they are probably taking on more risk because they are now acting as CO and have a greater responsibility for supervising the actions of a troop's leaders --- and so more chances to be n
  3. I don't want to down play the risks here, but they also shouldn't be over stated. The whole point of a corporation, of any type, is that they protect individuals from liability and leave it all on the corporation. Churches may be being sued, but the church elders who run them are not. The limit of liability for a corporation is the assets that the corporation owns. I do think an umbrella policy is a good idea for anyone involved in youth activities irrespective of what the over lying organization is; I've had one since I became a Tiger leader decades ago.
  4. Interestingly, these folks, speaking of this kind of PR stuff broadly not just BSA individually, sincerely don't see it that way. One particular argument I remember was when we decided to change a rarely used employee perk, payroll withholding to pay for a discounted car insurance through the company. We were going to keep the discount but eliminate the withholding. The reason we were eliminating the withholding was because it was cumbersome and took up a lot of someone's time, but was used by very few employees. When the PR folks wrote the announcement they were describing the reason
  5. Pure speculation on my part, but I would think that whatever uncertainty there may be for the buyers, that is priced into their offer. But these are pretty straightforward real estate transactions, there shouldn't be much trouble in closing them. Multi-million dollar houses close in 45-60 days. As to where the money goes right away, hopefully into some nice safe investment held by the LC. I know my own LC isn't and wouldn't turn over any money until the settlement is all blessed and kosher. I haven't read into the bowels of the plan to see if there is a process for LCs to pay in
  6. Man it's been a long couple of years, such that I now think of ThenNow as not just a regular but maybe even an old timer on these threads. TN's original post was, I believe. most relevant because it was about the insufficiency of the settlement for individual victims, and spoke about how instead the bulk of the settlement was going to (hopefully) prevent future harms. In the same vein many of the victims of CSA that occurred in scouting will receive an amount smaller than they would be entitled to if these cases were being settled outside of bankruptcy, but there is at least some hope
  7. This is the really critical part to understand: the money is never the scout's, it belongs to the unit. The scout isn't entitled to it, the unit can decide to spend money on a scout that a scout helped raise, but it can also decide not to, even after the money has been raised. It's not for the scout or the family to decide what happens to money that be in a "scout account", that's a decision for the unit. The scout or family can express an opinion, but it's critical to understand that it's not their decision.
  8. I would add some nuance to that. My troop may have higher standards than council or BSA. The CC and COR are the people who recruit, select, and are responsible for troop leadership. Something that might not be full stop grounds for ending scouting membership might still be grounds for a change or even an ending of the individual's role in the troop. Additionally, I would really want to understand in depth any incident that was concerning enough for one of our parents to believe it worthy of reporting to council. This is the type of thing that make it really important to remember how
  9. Councils in open states like California are going to pay, whether through BSA bankruptcy or through their own. It's probably prudent to get that liquidity lined up.
  10. Everybody in the troop is allowed a "chaos" bucket: generally a five gallon bucket and lid. Any personal food, especially all the junk they buy from the trading post, is kept there. They're stored in the trailer at night so there's no temptation to have food in the tents. In addition to food storage, scouts tend to keep in them stuff they're working on like their handbooks, mb paperwork, projects, etc. That way they're not going in and out of a hot tent as often. They also make great seats for sitting around the campfire As SM I used a plastic toter rather than a bucket, but for all
  11. That is just gross on oh so many levels. I always made sure to have my own jar of peanut butter and box of crackers at camp, plus various other packaged semi healthy snacks, for nights like that. At our camp breakfast was always the best meal, and I made the most of it. Lunch and dinner were more hit or miss. Dinner always included a salad bar and I could usually do pretty well there. My consistent feedback on our camp's food was that they could do better providing healthier versions of what they served. Not everything has to be prepackaged, highly processed frozen stuff from GFS
  12. This is a really big misunderstanding about the relationship between BSA's legal troubles and the IV files. The files aren't the reason that BSA is in trouble. BSA is in trouble because tens of thousands of boys and young men were sexually assaulted and brutalized while and because they participated in Boy Scouts. Most of the attackers were not in the files, most of them were not found out at the time. You don't need any kind of files when you have living witnesses who can testify about what was done to them and by whom. The absence or presence of files doesn't change the facts of t
  13. For years I pretended I didn't know they existed, two years ago I was getting frantic calls from my DE begging me to finally fill one out. We have two troop fundraisers a year, I fill out an application for one of them.
  14. Zero is the answer from my unit, and I've never heard of a unit giving any. I've been doing this for a long time, and have had several council board members who are also adult leaders in our unit. We do allow/invite a council rep to do an FOS ask at our spring COH, and our troop families give. We support popcorn sales, but we don't push hard for it as it's not a primary fundraiser for us. Broadly we're very supportive of our council and have good relations with them, so I'm not saying this as someone with an antagonistic relationship with council. A couple additional thoughts and ques
  15. That isn't the most common format for a meeting, but I suspect what you were expecting is also not what a common format for a meeting should be. ScoutsBSA is very different from Cubs when it comes to what the focus and purpose of meetings are. The meetings are not and should not be focused on rank advancement. The idea you have that there should be "work towards progress" is just not the focus. At this age advancement is individual not group oriented. A group of scouts can decide they want to work together or at the same time on a particular advancement skill, but the Cub way of ever
  16. As I understand the restriction, you're most specifically not supposed to go out and simply ask for money for the troop for things like equipment or to cover the cost of outings.. If the grant your SPL has applied for is conservation projects than that's not really benefitting the troop so you're probably okay. I would however make sure your CO is okay with it since they're actually the beneficiary.
  17. We had this situation once. We just left the scout registered as a Webelo II but had him crossover to the troop with his den mates. We like to have crossover by March so that the newest scouts get a couple of weekend campouts under their belts before summer camp. First year summer camp can be hard enough because it's usually such a big change for the youngest scouts; when it's their first ever camp where they're really responsible for themselves it can be overwhelming.
  18. Our patrol duty rosters look like whatever the patrols wat them to look like, it's not an adult function. For the most part they slot in two cooks, two scouts for clean-up, maybe somebody on water if we have to haul it from somewhere. I'm not sure about twiddling thumbs, but there's no reason for everybody to be busy for the sake of being busy. The rest of the patrol can be kicking a ball, playing cards, just goofing off, or maybe even the dreaded "working on requirements."
  19. What about the Facilities Use/Chartered by Council option?
  20. There may be others from your diocese reading the forum, maybe they have ideas, maybe they're looking for help.
  21. there are lots of questions and answers needed specific to an individual situation, but the whole point of corporations is that they separate the owners of the corporation from individual liability. When GM gets sued the shareholders of GM can't be held liable. More analogous to this situation, three guys want to start a business, say a canoe livery service, so they form a corporation. They hire an employee, that employee does something stupid and someone gets hurt, the corporation gets sued, but the only assets at risk are the assets owned by the corporation. The assets of the indiv
  22. If BSA was an ongoing concern, they would have had to list the GSUSA lawsuit as a contingent liability on their balance sheet while it was still undecided in District Court. Once they lost there it would probably drop from the balance sheet but still be listed in a footnote. I don't know how that translates in a bankruptcy case. It would be legal malpractice for their lawyers not to argue for some money being set aside, but they really shouldn't be surprised if it doesn't happen, or if the money set aside is very small.
  23. The short answer is that attorneys who filed claims on behalf of clients were supposed to do do some screening as to basic validity of a claim before they filed. If a claimant was pro se, that is representing themselves, then they themselves attested to the basic validity. Any claim made was made under penalty of perjury so there is the possibility of severe penalties in the event a fraudulent claim is made. At least in part because it isn't yet certain that there will be a settlement or any money actually paid out there hasn't been any greater scrutiny than that of the veracity of the
  24. I'm not sure what you mean by not supporting the OA. If you mean they actively discourage troop members from being in it, that's going to be a bigger barrier for you. If you mean the troop just doesn't bother holding elections or otherwise encouraging interaction than a little support from your Scoutmaster should be enough to get started. It doesn't take a lot of troop involvement to make it possible for those scouts interested to be allowed to become members. Basically the troop just has to let scouts from the OA come in and conduct an election. This should be a less than 30 minute
  25. OK, no they're not losing money on those events. The contributions there are also money they brought in as part of those events. "Contributions reportable on Schedule B(Form 990) are contributions, grants, bequests, devises, and gifts of money or property, whether or not for charitable purposes." I'm not tax guy enough to know exactly why they're pulling them out of gross receipts, but they're definitely revenue associated with the events. Most likely some part of every ticket they sell for say the golf outing is listed as a gift or "contribution" rather than just kept as simple gross
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