http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/feb ... ave-grubb/

The Sierra Club’s micromanagement of its San Diego chapter, refusal to fill key staff positions there and failure to mediate disagreements among local activists have led to the turmoil that may end in suspension of the chapter, said Lori Saldana, a past chapter chairwoman and former assemblywoman.

Saldana’s comments provide the clearest picture yet of the discord plaguing the 66-year-old chapter. The Sierra Club’s national office is scheduled to seek comments today from its local members on the proposed suspension, and the national board will vote on the issue this month.

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Lori Saldaña
“It started to appear that the local volunteers were being overruled in our policy-making by people in San Francisco, who were working in the Sierra Club (national) office. I finally determined that they had no interest in restoring authority to the local, elected volunteers,” Saldana said in an interview with U-T San Diego. She also raised similar issues in an opinion piece for the San Diego Free Press.

The national president of the club, David Scott, wrote in a recent letter announcing the potential suspension that the chapter suffers from “ongoing conflicts and divisions” and that past efforts to resolve “factionalized strife” failed to prevent the current crisis. He has not elaborated on those concerns.

Although chapter suspensions are extremely rare in the Sierra Club’s neaerly 122-year history, several have occurred in recent years. Some leaders of the affected chapters have said they were ousted from their posts without the chance to review complaints or evidence against them. The power struggle in San Diego became public a few weeks ago and has drawn national scrutiny of the club, the country’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization.

Some Sierra Club activists said heavy-handed central management has compromised the organization’s democratic foundation and conservation mission. Observers also said the club faces additional challenges: generational shifts that make it harder to recruit new volunteers; the rise of smaller and more specialized environmental groups; and the local chapter’s inability to influence land-use policies with the same authority it wielded in the 1990s.

Saldana, who served as the San Diego chapter’s top leader between December 2012 and last October, said she left before her term expired amid frustration with the stalemate between the national office and the chapter’s stewards. She also said the national directors repeatedly overturned decisions by the local executive committee and appeared to side with one local member — current chapter chairman Dave Grubb — over the rest of the elected body.

As an example, she said, the national office reversed a local decision to impose term limits on executive committee members at Grubb’s request.

“I saw that he would be outvoted, and he would get a sympathetic ear from folks in San Francisco, often within hours,” Saldana said.

Grubb said the term-limit change was enacted in a manner that conflicted with the chapter’s own bylaws. He said some local leaders were flouting Sierra Club rules and ignoring the organization’s chain of authority on matters ranging from political endorsements to hiring decisions.

There is more at the link above

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The world does not revolve around you but your actions impact us all!

San Diego is consistent

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"We'll ride it until they pave it."

-Big Clyde

Their panties are in a bunch because the new interim mayor no longer hands out free hugs to Sierra Club members:

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Velo Ergo Endo

So is this good for the mtb community?

I don't think it will have much influence. It sounds like even thought the regional chapter may go away, there is still a strong national presence that would step in in their absence.

Or it could, in theory, be worse. At least we had the ability to meet with the local chapter to try and forge alliances (remote as the chance would be). That would all but vanish at the national level.

Just think of it as meeting with a local government representative vs knocking on the door of the white house. Where do you stand a better chance?

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The world does not revolve around you but your actions impact us all!

Good riddance. Useless twits.

Screw the Sierra Club and the Birkenstocks they stumbled in on.

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Obama's America: Our enemies don't fear us; our allies don't trust us.

As a mountain bike rider, what they see as negatives look like positives to me.

If their presence here is diminished, I wouldn't mind a bit. I was actually a bit disappointed when Foster Lodge survived the last fire. It was supposed to spare the Shriners, and eat Foster. What went wrong?

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Scum on a Bike

Yeah, their troubles have been ongoing, but there's nothing good for trails, open space preservation or land management that could ever have come out of the SD Sierra Club. They are virulent anti-access types.

Exactly. The sierra club is garbage. The retards have turned nearly every inch of public land into a DMZ.

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"To protect these sensitive habitats, we must first destroy them with bulldozers, trucks, and signs so people understand how important it is that we manage them" - Chris Zirkle

"Nothing dollarable is safe, however guarded" - John Muir