Okay, second attempt to capture last nights AGM.
The meeting started with the usual suspects on each side of the divide although I think there are actually becoming 3 divides - 3P, Fitzy and ParraFirst. This is really sad in my opinion though having said that, there is probably more chance for change than with only 2 divisions.
During acceptance of the minutes there was a few people that spoke against them being accepted, the main issues being not the minutes themselves but whether the meeting as actually constitutional seeing as it was not held in 2013 as required. Some ambiguouity (sp) in the constitution allowed for the Chairman to state that legal advice was that it could continue. The delay was apparently caused by the PLC Board delaying the issue of the guarantee letter it provides each year and the auditors inability to sign-off the annual report without this letter. Seemed petty at the time, but maybe there was a reason for it which came into play later on.
There was no real comments on the financials and I must admit, I dont think the Chair gave clear instructions to the members on when they could make comments before quickly accepting the financials. We definitely need a Chairman who knows the rules of running an AGM and follows them.
The tackling award was won by Matt Keating and the try-scoring award by Ken Sio (again). Only 10 tries to win he try-scoring award is a sad indictment on our 2013 attack. Sid Kelly gave a nice speech about the last surviving foundation player and he accepted a small award. I think his name was Eric somebody but I didnt catch it and when i tried to look it up earlier I lost this update so am not doing that again.
Got to the motion regarding bringing the footy team back to the PDRLC and this is where the meeting got fun. Very emotive issue and to be honest, I think some people didnt understand clearly the motion itself. The PDRLC cant just take the footy team back, it needs the PLC to give it back and it took some time for this to become clear. The motion was for the PDRLC to do all possible to get it back, but this motion was eventually dismissed by a private vote of 78 against 49 for.
During the discussion/debate on the motion there was passionate arguments both for and against. Some people spoke about why it was given to the PLC in the first place. Board Members got up and spoke both for (Price and Kelly) and against (Sharp) and there were no suprises here. Phil Sims (from TheFilthySpammers) spoke a couple of times about the need for 'constitutional reform' before simply handing the licence to run the NRL team over to anyone and whilst personally I agree with the need for the reform, this needs to be done outside of the passion of an AGM in my opinion.
The other key thing is that the Board has committed (again) to the investigation of postal/proxy/online voting. Spags agreed that they were asked to do something about this at the last Board meeting and claimed that Ken Edwards had the action which he hadn't completed before his departure. A show of hands from member was probably 70-30 in favour of introducing absentee voting options.
There were a couple of other comments from the floor under general business. I raised the issue of why when people become 'members' of the BGA and STH's they dont get told they are automatically members of the PDRLC and that 127 voting members from a potential well in the thousands is something that should be looked at. Apparently the CEO is looking at membership structures in the whole and this will encompass this issue. Time will tell.
Meeting closed around 8.45pm and instead of sausage rolls we got some nice pastries.
Anyone else who was there can correct me if my recollection is inaccurate.
