The dates for the 2012 Soaring Council meetings were set at the November 21st, 2011 Soaring Council meeting with Robin Marien (concessionaire) and Jeremy Bishop (flight director) in attendance. The July 2012 meeting was scheduled for July 16th at the Gliderport facility, and that date has been in place for nearly 8 months now.

Yet just last Friday (the Friday before the Monday meeting) we got a message from Byron Lowry (sailplane representative) stating:



I initially replied to Byron and the Council with this message:



After giving it some more thought, I decided to check with the Soaring Council bylaws. The bylaws made it very clear that anyone who could not attend "shall" designate a representative to be their proxy. So I sent a follow up message to the Council a few minutes after my initial message:



After thinking about it, I realized that some of the members might not have seen the actual bylaws, so I decided to send one final message which included an actual copy of the page regarding meetings and proxies:



That was late Friday night. When I checked my email this morning, the only reply was from the SDHGPA representative (David Metzgar) who wrote this:



This is exactly the kind of garbage that comes from the SDHGPA. Dave Metzgar does not address any facts and instead resorts immediately to personal attacks. This has been the same kind of reply that I had gotten from David Metzgar when he was president of the SDHGPA, and it was this kind of response that led to the founding of the Torrey Hawks in the first place.

In addition to Dave's message, I heard from another source that the meeting had been cancelled because Robin Marien (concessionaire) had scheduled some other use of the facility during that time (even though Robin attended the November 2011 meeting when those dates were picked). So I sent the following message to the group responding to Dave Metzgar's message and addressing the possibility that Robin was partially responsible for the cancellation:

Would it be safe to hold my breath? Will the bylaws prevail? Are these people for real.

Wait, it gets even better...

I began hearing that it wasn't cancelled because of absences (which would be against the bylaws) but because Robin said that the meeting room (in the Gliderport building) was unavailable. So I decided to check it out.

I arrived at the Gliderport right around 6pm - the time of the scheduled Soaring Council meeting - and I found that the meeting room was clearly available. So I decided to document this with my handy camera.

Note that the "meeting room" is essentially a gear storage room. In addition to holding meetings, it is used to store and repair paragliding equipment. So it's not uncommon to see someone using it for that purpose. That's the kind of routine use I found at 6pm when I arrived. More specifically, there were two pilots finishing up a repair on a paragliding harness. These first two pictures show this:



This was certainly not a reason to cancel the Soaring Council meeting since there was plenty of room to finish the job in other parts of the shop. This photo shows just part of the available area (beyond the stool) where the same work could have been done.



For those who are familiar with the building, the area shown above opens up to an even larger area to the right around the counter. But even in the worst case, the repair was done by 6:15 and the room was completely empty at that time. These photos were taken at 6:15 and 6:17 respectively:



Shortly after I took those photos, Robin decided that he didn't like me documenting the empty room, so he locked the door and gave me "the finger" through the glass. This photo of Robin (wearing a red shirt) was taken at 6:18pm (note Robin's hand and finger at the center of the photo just above the reflection of the flash):



So I continued to document the status of the room by periodically taking pictures through the glass door. For example, these photos were taken around 6:45pm:



They both show that the room remained completely unused.

Around 7:06pm, Jeremy (on the right) brought in some paragliding gear while Robin (on the left) continued to mill about:



Right around 7:10pm, Robin locked up the office:



At 7:12pm, Robin drove out of the park:



The meeting room remained completely empty, as shown by these example photographs taken between 7:16pm and 7:24pm:



At about 7:26pm, Robin returned in his truck and unlocked the building to go inside.



About 20 minutes later (7:47pm) a police car showed up:



I watched the two officers speak with Robin for quite some time and I overheard Robin making all kinds of unfounded accusations including that I had been "stalking" him. The police seemed to be replying that there was no law against citizens being in the park taking pictures. This seemed to get Robin somewhat agitated, but the police stood by their position. After a while, Robin went inside the building and the police emerged to leave. I walked up and introduced myself and asked what the problem was. The police asked me my side of the story and I told them why I was there (cancelled Soaring Council meeting) and why I was documenting the empty room. I specifically asked if I was doing anything wrong and their reply was that I was not. After that, we had a fairly congenial conversation about the rules of being on the property, and it became clear that everything I had done was well within my rights. As they were about to depart, I asked if I could take their photos, and they didn't object. These photos were taken around 8:05pm:



The police left shortly after that (maybe 8:07pm?), and Robin left a few minutes later (around 8:09pm);



The bottom line is that despite what anyone else may have said, the meeting room was available all evening and the Soaring Council certainly could have used it for their meeting. If Robin was misleading the Council as to the room's availability, then that's a fairly serious problem. It remains unclear what exactly had taken place since neither Robin nor the Soaring Council members have been forthcoming on these matters.

Meet on the grass, under the sky, with the wind, surrounded by fresh air and birds ....
and advance soaring equitably ...

Thanks for the vigilance, BobK,

Lift,
JoeF