Hey Iceman! Hope all is well with you!

This is how I understand it, and I'm learning more every day it seems.

Some of the controversy is because the CCC was an independent club before the CC & GTCC had in place rules to deal with chapter requirements, yet still chartered it as the first chapter.

The Floridian club was the second chapter chartered. They had in place a provision in their local bylaws that allowed for associate memberships that didn't require membership in national. It was then that the CC & GTCC added bylaws to the national club constitution specifying that all chapter members must be national members.

It gets even more complicated from that point. The CC & GTCC could have made the local entities member clubs instead of chapters. The CC & GTCC is a member club of the ANA. Membership of every CC & GTCC member is not required by the ANA because of the member club designation. I'm not an accountant, but, it's my understanding that the designation of local organizations to be "chapters" and not "member clubs" could mean that the CC & GTCC would be required to handle all dues paid into the local chapters under the tax laws governing a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational hobby club.

If those who wrote the bylaws concerning affiliated local groups did so with the intention of imposing new requirements on already existing clubs and their members, they succeeded. We resisted. The bylaws were changed. Now the change is being classified as catering to the lowest common denominator, dumbing down, catering to the weakest link, and those who approve of the change are being called crackpots and their non-national members are called parasites.

Not exactly a good way to make friends and influence people if you ask me.

We (the CCC) started out as a separate organization of people with a more narrowed set of common interests than the CC & GTCC has. We still are, witnessed by the fact that our chapter charter was revoked for about a year, yet we kept holding monthly meetings, sending out a monthly newsletter, AND kept encouraging our local members to join the CC & GTCC.

A small minority of our locals don't belong to national. That should remain their choice.

Bob