Andy: The amendment requires a “material” benefit. Given the circumstances you outline the diversification within your mutual funds would keep any single decision from resulting in a material benefit. As previously noted, if you currently have assets including a mutual fund in investments that “could” be impacted by the shaping of League Affairs and Policy the current Article 11 suggests you are ineligible to run for office. The amendments would change that to require a “material” benefit and even in those rare instances you would not be ineligible to run or to serve unless the conflict was an ongoing conflict with League affairs or activities. Jay, KØQB -----Original Message----- From: Andy Oppel [mailto:andy_oppel@earthlink.net] Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 3:30 PM To: arrl-odv Subject: [arrl-odv:13353] Re: re odv1339 Proposals to Amend Article 11, By Laws 47 and 42 and Rules regarding elections At 11:45 AM 11/28/2005, you wrote: Under the current Article 11, the mere ownership of an investment or business interest that may result in a financial benefit to a Director, no matter how trivial or remote, would disqualify that Director. I see big problems here. I have three investment accounts (an IRA, a 401K, and a cash account). All of them are in managed portfolios, which means that the mix of stocks, bonds and mutual funds changes just about every month as the portfolio manager adjusts for winners and losers. There are literally dozens of investments in each one, and I'm not able to keep them all in my head at the same time. On top of that, a bunch of them are mutual funds, and I really don't have the time to track every stock or bond that every mutual fund might hold (each likely holding dozens of investments). While together these funds represent my life savings (and trust me when I tell you that I am far from wealthy -- at least in financial terms), there is no single investment that is so large that I would be thinking about it if called upon to make decisions on behalf of the ARRL. But, there are bound to be some companies in there somewhere that are in the communications business. Surely others on the board are in the same situation. The way this is written, if a Director stands to gain or lose even $1 based on how a particular company stock or bond fares that is somehow involved in a matter before the board (one that he or she may not even know they own), then they must recuse themselves. I don't know about the rest of you, but it would take me at least an hour to research a company name through all the accounts and all the mutual funds just to verify whether I owned it or not. Multiply that by the number of matters that come before the board (some with little or no warning) and I think the impossibility of enforcement is obvious. If the wording specified a significant financial benefit (and perhaps set a threshold dollar amount such as the IRS does for items that must be reported to them vs. not), then perhaps we'd find something more easily enforced. -- Andy Oppel, N6AJO