Burnt Orange Report

Susan made the same statement Monday night after addressing the Petitioner's agenda and the confusion brief hand-over of the chair to David Griggs. She said something to the affect f, "changes need to be made even if they include me not serving out my term". Then the lack of a large enough quorum to swear in new precinct chairs was noted, and I suspect the memory of the comment was lost in the melee that followed.

Having read this mornings article about Susan Hays, is extremely upsetting to me. How absurd that she would see hersels as the savior of DCDP.Ms. Hays portrays herself as the victim Monday night. Ms Hays claims that someone rushed the podium and grabbed the mic. What I saw was Katy Hubener approach the podium and speak into the mic and when finished was given a rousing cheer from the crowd. If there are any victims here, it's the precinct chairs that showed up, to try resolve a very bad situation created by Ms. Hays herself.
I was approached around 7:00PM Monday night at the CWA hall and was told that There was a move afoot to break quorum and would I be willing to surrender my credentials in order to accomplish this. I was told to to give the credentials to "Barry". I was also told that all they needed was 15 credentials to be turned in and the quorum would be broken. This was being done by Ms. Hays people. Upon realizing that a quorum had been established,and my interpretation of the rule is that once quorum is established. it cannot be reversed. There was talk of Ms. Hays opponents having established a desk to sign in Precinct Chairs although personally, I never saw such a desk, and that was attributed to the delay in reaching the numbers to establish quorum.
During the meeting Ms. Hays continually held up proceeding by invoking Roberts Rules, which I and sevberal others felt was a delaying tactic and at 8:30 PM decide to hold a role call, Shortly after The CWA Local President came to the podium and declared the meeting over and advised us to leave the premises immediately.

Every meeting that I have attended that Ms. Hays has chaired has been total chaos. If Ms. Hays is sincerely interested in the "salvation" of DCDP she will immediately remover herself from the party chair tom Madrzykowski

Was there two different meetings?

"...Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez, a strong supporter of Ms. Hays, called her from outside the meeting and warned that it was not safe for her to leave..."

MM: I thought that Susan walked out with the precinct chairs. I could be wrong. The only person I remember wanting to charge the podium was Pauline Dixon. No... really.

"...According to Ms. Hays, a man rushed her and snatched a microphone from her hand, which helped lead to the abrupt end of the meeting..."

MM: I was 10 feet from Susan and I do not remember this happening.

"...Her detractors include Mr. Molberg, Democrat Theresa Daniel and Shannon Bailey, head of the Stonewall Democrats, a gay and lesbian political group...."

MM: I will have to give Mr. Jeffers a call tomorrow. I was elected President in November.

"...But Ms. Hays says her detractors are angry with her for more personal reasons, including her refusal to give some of them jobs...."

MM: What is she talking about?

Although I am serious about these curiosities, not everything that happened Monday night was bad, some good did occur. The executive committee passed two positive resolutions: the first one requires the DCDP Executive Committee to meet at least once each quarter to provide Executive Committee members with the most up to date information. The second resolution creates a DCDP Exec Comm Advisory Committee with the charge to develop a two year campaign and finance plan. Three members were elected from each State Senate District. I was honored to be elected to be one of the representatives from the 23rd Senate District. Regardless how this chapter ends, Democrats can be assured that we will be prepared for the 2006 election season.

You have to consider the source - Gromer is an editorial writer, not a journalist, and he's historically been the Chair's mouthpiece in the Dallas Morning News. He also did not attend the meeting so his rendition is second-hand and filtered through Ms. Hays' own public relations.

If Ms. Valdez really thought it wasn't safe for the Chair to leave the building, then certainly she of all people had the resources to guarantee her safety. Apparently Ms. Valdez thought a cell phone sufficient to fend off what Susan has referred to as a "mob".

This "mob" mostly consisted of 163 neighborhood leaders some of whom have been around since LBJ was President, two former Dallas City Councilmen, a State Representative, a host of 2006 judicial candidates and an assortment of hacks, activists, bloggers and political junkies such as myself.

The Chair never wanted the meeting, tried to stop it an hour before it began, stonewalled it once it got started, and created the chaos that caused it to completely breakdown.

And this is "leadership"?

According to Ken Molberg, "I've seen bigger brawls in church."

Oh, really? I don't know what church he goes to, but at my church, everybody gets along, and we work TOGETHER to get things done!

tom Madrzykowski said above, "Every meeting that I have attended that Ms. Hays has chaired has been total chaos."

He is correct. Every meeting has been chaos because the core group of hate-mongers have been attacking Susan and disrupting the meetings since the day she was sworn in.

I do not know if I approached tom, but, I am the person who instigated breaking quorum. Susan did not do it, knew about it, instigate it, or approve it.

In fact, she was approached prior to the meeting with the suggested strategy of not attending the meeting so that there would not be a quorum. But, Susan wanted us there. When I saw the obnoxious behavior - which, given past behavior I should have expected - and the small number needed to break quorum, I did recruited several others and we got the number needed out of the room to break quorum.

Barry in no way instigated this. In fact, he wasn't wearing a name tag, and not having met him, I didn't know his name until later. He did his job and told us the number of people needed to break quorum - which is public information. And, we (the quorum breakers) having him take the blue voting cards, because he was the person who was signing people in and keeping track of the numbers at the time we took our action.

Please note that several of the people who are posting here have been campaigning for the county chair position since before the November election.

Anyone who would work to undermine the county chair and endanger the election by campaigning for Susan's position instead of working to elect Democrats immediately prior to an election doesn't deserve the job. I say this despite the fact that several are people I've known for years and used to respect.

Geoff

P. S.

I've been saying all along that it is our job to work to make the party and the party chair successful. I do this because I think it is the corect thing to do.

Little did I know that we are all required to do that by the party rules. Guess I'm smarter than I though I was and I have a pretty high opinion of myself!

The Rules of the Texas Democratic Party, Article 1, Section A, Paragraph 6 states, "That all Democrats are bound to defend, to protect and to honor our nation, our state and our Party, and that when they are right, it is our privilege to sustain them, but when they err, it is our duty to correct them;"

Thanks to Byron and Vince for keeping up with this....blogged a little on my perspective of it over at North Dallas Thirty.