How does the USHPA want you to talk to them?

I know that it seems very strange in this world of open communication that the
USHPA wants you to go through an intermediary when you want to say something
about USHPA policy and maybe have some affect on its direction. They feel that
it is supposed to be this way. You contact your own regional director and tell
him/her about your concerns. Then that regional director is supposed to be
sensitive to those concerns when the regional directors get together bi-annual
BOD meetings.

You regional director is also supposed to be responsible to communicate to you
back home what is going on with the USHPA BOD and tell you the results of the
BOD meetings. A mediated conversation and a lagging conversation to be sure. 
I wonder how many of you have engaged in this way of communicating with the
USHPA.

But for the most part the regional directors don't know how you feel about
various issues, because they often aren't aware of what issues will be discussed
at the BOD meetings. The issues come up and they are on the spot to vote on them
without any consultation with their constituents. This is a bare bones agenda
available (see Oz Report soon), but no details until two weeks before the BOD
meeting, and even then much of the crucial details are missing.

And, just to make matters worse, they are currently (like, right now) voting on issues via email
that you can't be told about because Mike Haley, the competition committee
co-chairman restricts his email to board members only (this is in fact a common
practice among the board members). So you don't know what they are voting on,
and they can't tell you, and you have no idea of what to say to them.

Now how exactly are we supposed to take the continual reminder that we are
supposed to communicate with the USHPA through our regional directors as
anything but a bad joke, or a deliberate attempt to suppress any input from the
membership? The BOD communication is structurally set up to hide from the
members what is currently going on and what they are deciding until after the
fact. The communication that the President and others have spoken about is the
USHPA telling members what they have done. It's a one way street as far as they
are concerned.

Now, I have to remind everyone that these people are volunteers (which, I guess
means that they are not accountable for their actions), and that if we press
them too hard they just might get up and leave. But really, doesn't it seem just
a bit too strange that the membership is cut out of the communications loop, and
has little or no input before the decisions are made?

So exactly when are the BOD members going to make their internal communications
available to the membership? All it takes is a minor change in the BOD mailing
list.

More on this in Part 2 of this article.