On Wed, Jul 12 1995, Jim Milles wrote:
> Arguing policy about whether or not we should even have a Washington
> Affairs office is one thing; being realistic about the costs is another.
Jim claims that it was unrealistic for Fritz Snyder to compare the percentage
of ALA's budget that goes for lobbying with the AALL percentage.
OK, but Fritz's numbers show that AALL is less than 1/10 the size of ALA and
spends nearly _twice_ as much money (dollars, not percentages) on lobbying.
Furthermore, the difference alone (dollars) amounts to more than _half_ of
what the Executive Board wants to grab from the LLJ subsidy.
Since it is now clear (as it was not when the Strategic Plan was being
discussed several years ago) that every activity AALL continues will be at
the expense of something else that it ceases to do, I think that the most
unreasonable thing is to discuss policy about whether we should have a
function _without_ simultaneously discussing the cost of that function.
Thus, if you ask me "should we have a Washington office"--I would answer yes.
But if you say, "should we spend $77,625 on the Washington office at a time
when we are cutting out two issues of LLJ"--I would prefer to see the
Washington office share the pain.
And I'm sure there must be other activities that could trim a little more to
make up the rest of the difference, so that LLJ could continue to publish
four issues without socking a separate subscription charge on top of our
(soon to be increased anyway) AALL dues.
Greg Koster This is what the Lord asks of you, only this:
CUNY Law School to act justly
gek@maclaw.law.cuny.edu to love tenderly,
and to walk humbly with your God.
(Micah 6:8)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 14 2007 - 20:48:58 PST