The Association’s Bylaws have historically included not just the essentials for our identity and governance but a host of operational detail at a lower level of application. The Bylaws served as an operations document as well. The Bylaws had become unnecessarily cumbersome and required review in preparation for change. The Association launched an initiative in July 2006 to review and streamline the Bylaws and transfer operational detail into a portion of a comprehensive operations document. That initiative was taken on by directors and committeemen assigned by the President who have met six times and communicated electronically over a period of 18 months. This final draft product is a new set of Bylaws, accompanied by a Policies and Practices section of an Operations Manual. The Bylaws have been reduced to 7 articles from 17 and the page count reduced to 8, exclusive of diary pages. The Operations Manual is an open-ended document which will contain an annual operations schedule, a full set of director and committeeperson function descriptions and a set of policy decisions as they are developed.       

Any content in the current Bylaws that is missing from the proposed set has been transferred to the Operations Manual, with duplicate wording removed.  Further, sections of proposed Bylaws and transferred sections have also been streamlined by simplification. For instance, rather than document separately the election and business processes for the Board of Directors and the Board of Trustees, a single election process has been put in place to cover both with a reduction in verbiage. Similarly, conduct of meetings has been standardized. 

The final drafts of the proposed Bylaws and the Policies and Practices section of the Operations Manual are posted on these pages. One should not review the Bylaws without concurrently reviewing the proposed Policies and Practices intended for the Operations Manual as well.  The current Bylaws are on this webpage as well for comparison.

Thanks are due to all the reviewers who responded to the committee. 

 Bylaws Committee:   John Watson, Fallbrook, Committee Chairman
                                Robb Margrave, Novato, FWSA Trustee
                                George Kish, Orange Council President
                                Bob Ellis, Truckee, Vice President, Racing

Proposed Bylaws

Proposed Opperations Manual

Current Bylaws