10/12/10 UPDATE: Cascade Bicycle Club Board of Directors announces transition agreement
The following is a message from Chris Weiss, President and Chair, Board of Directors of Cascade Bicycle Club:
Dear members,
First, let me thank you for your ongoing support and your commitment to the Club. Since we announced the Board of Directors’ decision on Monday to make a change in our Executive Director, some of you have asked for more information about why we made the decision. On behalf of the Board, I want to share a few more details with you.
On Monday, Oct. 4, we met with Chuck Ayers to summarize management issues we had discussed with him for many months, to explain our need for a smooth transition in leadership and to request his resignation. After a long and respectful discussion, Chuck declined our request and the Board terminated his employment.
This decision was very difficult for the Board. All of us are avid cyclists. Chuck personally recruited most of us to serve as volunteer Board members. He’s our friend. Chuck is a person of the highest integrity and we deeply appreciate his contributions to the Club over the years. We considered our decision very carefully, over time and always through the lens of what was in the best interest of the Club now and for years to come. Difficult as it was, it is the right decision.
Cascade Bicycle Club was founded 40 years ago as a grassroots membership organization. The Board is charged with overseeing the Club’s financial viability, charting its strategic direction and supervising the Executive Director, including, if necessary, deciding whether the ED should continue to lead our Club. These core governance responsibilities are essential to the long-term viability and effective function of Cascade Bicycle Club.
Over the past few years, the Board consistently has supported Chuck and the Club staff. In addition to being responsible stewards of the Club’s finances, we evaluate and approve electoral endorsements recommended by the staff and authorize Cascade’s legal challenges, such as our successful battle with Lake Forest Park to protect the Burke Gilman Trail, the ongoing BGT Missing Link litigation, and our current challenge to the legality of the Transportation 2040 Plan.
The Board fully supports the public policy positions and strong advocacy voice of the Cascade Bicycle Club. We are 100% committed to Cascade’s continuing role as an unwavering and consistent grassroots voice to demand safe and accessible streets and trails for cycling and cyclists.
So, why the change?
As Cascade’s membership has grown – now to more than 13,000 members – so did the staff (now 23 employees), our programs and the complexity of our operations, demanding different management skills than in our earlier years.
The Club’s public voice now helps to shape our region’s transportation policies. We are one of the most potent political forces in the region and one of the strongest and most influential advocates in the nation for cyclists and cycling. To continue to be a successful advocate – in fact, in order to strengthen our advocacy while also enhancing our rides, programs and activities – we must become more strategic and focused. When tough tactics are called for, we will not shy away. But we also must build coalitions and back up our beliefs with reason and with dignity. Cascade Bicycle Club is its members, and we must always be mindful that when we speak, we represent each of you.
Chuck’s leadership helped build our advocacy position. However, increasingly, his leadership style resulted in actions and public statements that periodically were counterproductive to the image we wanted for our Club and jeopardized our lobbying to secure passage of the Vulnerable User Bill and many other advocacy initiatives. The Board grew more and more concerned that this underlying management philosophy would limit the Club’s effectiveness in serving members as well as its appeal to donors and sponsors. Critical comments of Cascade began to arise not just in the media, but among the grassroots cyclists and citizen advocates who are the lifeblood of our Club, risking the polarization of the community against cycling as Seattle moves forward with many pro-cycling reforms.
These issues are only part of a larger assessment of the Club’s leadership needs. Over the past few years, the Board has worked with and consistently supported Chuck in his efforts to promote growth and to position the Club for the future. More recently, our views have increasingly diverged regarding how the Executive Director should best execute his duties to ensure the efficient and effective management of the Club. To go into further detail about this personnel issue, and the specifics of how the Board worked with Chuck to address the Board’s concerns, would be inappropriate and inconsistent with our desire to respect Chuck’s privacy. Ultimately, only after a long process and after many careful discussions with Chuck, did the Board reach its conclusion that a change was necessary in order for the Club to realize its potential.
A change in leadership is not unusual in the business world or the nonprofit world. Many organizations find themselves at a crossroads where the successes of existing leadership cause the organization to evolve to the point where continued success requires a different style of leadership, fresh perspectives and new ideas. This is where Cascade is today.
The Board is deeply appreciative of Chuck and of the many accomplishments Cascade made under Chuck’s leadership. During his 13-year tenure, Chuck, staff, volunteers and our sponsors helped grow Cascade into the nation’s largest cycling organization. Cascade runs thousands of rides and manages dozens of events and educational programs each year. And, as noted earlier, we are influential advocates for policies to benefit cycling, cyclists and communities. Now that the Club has reached this level of success, we need an executive director who can build upon these accomplishments and expand our potential over the next decade.
This growth demands that Cascade remain a powerful voice in advocacy. Again, I want to emphasize that the Board is 100% committed to Cascade’s existing policy positions and to our identity as a grassroots organization. We endorse our local governments’ continuing strong actions to improve and extend bike trails and make bold changes to improve cycling on our roads.
To ensure a smooth transition and the ongoing operations of all our programs and activities, Board Vice-Chair Peter Morgan has taken on daily management duties for the next several weeks. A veteran cyclist, Peter is on leave from the Board and is serving Cascade pro bono. Through 2009, Peter was the Executive Vice President at Group Health. He brings extensive management experience to the role and has worked closely with Cascade staff this year in framing Cascade’s almost-completed strategic plan. The Board will immediately begin recruiting an interim executive director who will likely serve for three to six months before we hire a permanent executive director.
We will post the Executive Director job description soon. With the involvement of the Club’s staff, the Board will look for a visionary and dynamic organizational leader with experience in inspiring members, staff and communities. We’ll be looking for an ED with experience managing a large organization so that we can drive and manage continued growth.
In closing, it is important to remember that all of us are the Cascade Bicycle Club – not just a single individual – and, together, we are the voice of cyclists and cycling.
Please contact us if you would like to discuss the transition further. The Annual Meeting of the Cascade Bicycle Club is on Thursday, October 21, at 6:30 p.m. at REI. We encourage you to come. Again, thank you for your continued support.
Chris Weiss
President and Chair, Board of Directors
Cascade Bicycle Club
chris.weiss@cascadebicycleclub.com
Reading these comments it’s not hard to see the clash being acted out at an organizational level between older, suburban/exurban, club ride, conservative membership and younger, urban, transportational, progressive members . The former don’t seem to care for aggressive transportational cycling advocacy, and the latter (myself at least) could care less about club rides. Serotta vs Surly, car-toppers vs car-less. But for me, it was working. I joined CBC for the advocacy and support for Ride to School. Did it feel odd that I was the only one to ride my bike to the Ride Leader Training? A bit, but I felt like there was plenty of common ground with the others there. You don’t have to come on a Kidical Mass ride, and I can skip the STP. But we all want to be safe and accepted on the roads.
What’s funny is that the non-cycling public can’t seem to tell the difference between CBC and Critical Mass, or don’t care that there’s a difference. But for younger folks who ride bikes, CBC has felt like a distinctly staid, conservative, sign-the-waiver, weekend warrior club, with the exception of more recent aggressive advocacy efforts and some of the kids/education stuff. I’d take a long look at the recent membership increases and ask yourselves if perhaps that new blood was attracted more by the advocacy/education and less by the recreational aspects.
If Chuck and (soon) David Hiller are gone, I don’t exactly see CBC moving in a more progressive direction, advocacy or personality-wise. Sure, Hiller has gone over-the-top, on occasion. But sometimes that’s necessary, sometimes that’s effective. Our opposition isn’t pulling any punches. We compromised with Ballard businesses with the interim route of the Missing Link, who sued to block the compromise route anyway. Pick any Seattle Times articles, or the Puget Sound Business Journal. That’s what we’re dealing with here. The backlash isn’t against Chuck or David. The backlash is against the success we’re having. Could we do a better job framing road diets as being about safety for all users and traffic speeds? Sure. So could SDOT.
For members that are upset about CBC’s voice about road diets, vigorous support for the Missing Link completion, Vulnerable Users bills, etc., are you really opposed to those visions, or the voice in which they were pursued? I think there’s room for debate over tone, but I hope the car-topper crowd can see how important those advocacy efforts are to us all.
The only way to keep me happy and involved would be to bring in people like the BTA’s new Rob Sadowski (from Chicago) or other strong, effective advocacy presence. We’ll see. But huge thanks to Chuck and future departed company for all their years of hard work on our behalf.
This letter only reinforces the perception that this is all nothing more than a clash of egos.
Weiss says:
“As Cascade’s membership has grown – now to more than 13,000 members – so did the staff (now 23 employees), our programs and the complexity of our operations, demanding different management skills than in our earlier years.”
“We are one of the most potent political forces in the region and one of the strongest and most influential advocates in the nation for cyclists and cycling…. we must become more strategic and focused.”
So, Weiss is saying: Chuck succeeded at growing the organization many times over and making it a very powerful political voice… so we need to fire him because we need someone good at big organizations and political strategy. Huh? Did Weiss even read his own words?
I think most telling is this bit from Weiss:
“The Board grew more and more concerned that this underlying management philosophy would limit the Club’s effectiveness in serving members as well as its appeal to donors and sponsors.”
In other words, the board wants to make CBC more corporate and they want someone slick who doesn’t ruffle feathers.
To be fair, I appreciate that we need to foster peace on the roadway, because having a bunch of angry, anti-bike drivers out there is not good for any of us. But I didn’t see Chuck doing anything “counterproductive.” In fact, I think Weiss and the board would do well to remember the diversity of CBC membership. At one end, there are the wealthy professionals who breakout their carbon fiber and lycra a few times a year. At the other end, there are the Critical Mass fixie dudes who bring a lot of passion. Not to mention the hardcore long-distance commuters who grind it out 365 days a year.
I thought Chuck was masterful in striking just the right balance in how CBC represented all of us. Maybe Weiss thinks this is easy, that there a lots of ED prospects who can bring this range of skills.
I fear they’ve made a big mistake. Chuck Ayers was exceptional. He won’t be so easily replaced.
I went on two Saturday group rides this month (October) both leaving from Gasworks Park. One ride only had about one dozen people, the other only five excluding the ride leader! Other than my teenage daughter on the second ride, I was one of the youngest people there and I am 50! The ride leaders were great (although both my age or older), the routes interesting for urban rides but only five people onone and on both rides most people all over 50? 20 years ago each of these rides would have attracted at least 20-30 people each with most under 45. I know October is a slow month but did you look at the Courier? Just not that many rides and almost none for beginers. We are short of ride leaders and rides. I can’t remember the last time I saw a 20 something on one of the slower paced rides. Honestly, things are not going well on the ground and this has been the trend for the last 10-12 yeas. We are in trouble and are not willing to admit it. We think that by becoming a political action group that can take the place of rides and riders. It can’t. 15 years ago I was recruited to serve on the board; I think to represent the interest of regular rides and ride leaders again the ” advocacy” people. (At that time we were supporting Critical mass). I declined because I saw the writing on the wall and did not want to waste my free time fighting a loosing battle. Apparently things have taken their course and we and now an advocacy club.
How about we just advocate a paved, swept shoulder and storm grates that go the right way and get back to leading and going on rides?
Michael – I’m afraid club rides just aren’t going to be what they used to be.
A lot of us younger riders (said with a smile – I’m 38) ride our bikes for transportation, create our own bike fun, participate in non-CBC bike events (rides, alleycats, scavenger hunts, Flannel Ride, Tweed Ride, Fiets of Parenthood, Kidical Mass, etc). We’re not interested in driving to a meetup, and the rides that leave from Seattle don’t hold so much appeal if you’re riding a bike every day on similar routes around the city.
Who knows for sure, maybe that style of riding will make a comeback. Tyvek chic? But for the near future, I think younger riders will be more attracted to less formal, internet-organized (“Did you look at the Courier?” is a question that illuminates a bit about why CBC is not exactly reaching a younger audience with a monthly paper mailing), more playful events. But what we want from Cascade is a voice at City Council, the Mayor’s Office, and in Olympia. Not saying it can’t do both. But “getting back to club rides” seems like a recipe for slow extinction.
If they’re serious about doing so, a major revamp of the website and ride submission process is in order.
Julian, I am not going to disagree with you (I am also a commuter in the summer, not just a group ride junkie) and this indeed was a topic of discussion back in the 80′s/90′s (rides v. advocacy). No point in rehashing that except to say being primarily a ride and rider oriented club didn’t give us much to fight or disagree about. It was all about rides and riding, tuperware lunches, overnight bicycle trips to Canada, etc. I was a ride leader at that time and can tell you that everyone pretty much read off the same page of music. Yes we wanted the city to make the storm grates go the right way, and put traffic signal cables in the road that would detect a steel frame bike but that was about it and we were succesful at that. Perhaps that was the beginning of the end. Anyway, we were a group of like minded people sharing a narrow non-political agenda so there wasn’t much to disagree about. Bicycle Alliance did all the political stuff and frankly we were warry of them. The only thing we never achieved was a club tool box and work shop. Did we ever get that done? Also, evey postition was a volunteer position and we were gratefull for people that stepped up to the plate. Believe me that quelched a lot of criticism. If you complained, someone could always nominate you to take over an do it yourself. Being a PAC is an enourmously more complicated and contentious endeavour, fraught with political challenges and risks of internecine warfare.
Here is something you should know. The Club didn’t conciously and affirmatively decide to go the PAC route, the Club was hijacked in that direction. The hijacking was done by people who:
a) wanted to bring in more revenues than merely Club dues, specifically, the much greater revenue that could be obtained from the donations a PAC type orginization could raise;
b) wanted to become paid employees and bosses of paid employees rather than merely being unpaid volunteers-up to then everybody was a volunteer, except maybe the secretary that put the Courier together- even STP was put on totally by volunteers; and
c) genuinely believed in the advocacy/PAC approach to fufilling Cascade’s mission statement and frankly were more interested in that than in rides.
Those people won the day, primarily by default as the ride oriented people just were not up for a fight. Many of them simply migrated to other start up clubs that were created by defecting CBC members (pratical minded Boeing engineers, many of them), most of whom have not returned to this day. So the club is now totally dominated by the advocacy people (23 employees, 23!) making self serving surveys to justify thier existence. You can now expect triumvrates, palace revolts, junta’s, alliances, party purges and all the other things that go along with being a political party as there is no primary, non-contentious activity (going on rides) that binds everybody together. Furthermore, there are other local cycling advocacy groups fighting for their share of the limited pool of bicycling advocacy donations, making defections, internal fights, etc. more likely.
All I am saying really is that the advocacy people got their way and now 15 years later this is the bed that CBC has made for itself. Don’t be suprised as the leadership gets more and more removed from the members (and more and more ensconced) and turmoil gets more routine. You can either have a unified, peaceful club centered around a non-political shared activity, or a contentious club with a political agenda. You just can’t have both.
Let me say one more thing. Other than people who enjoy supporting a cause by merely putting a check in the mail (and that kind of support is fickle), I don’t know how you are going to build up new sustaining members if you don’t have an active rides program that brings in new young blood. The reason we don’t have that is because rides are now a secondary or even tertiary function of the Club.
If you don’t like where all of this has gone, speak up and let me know.
One thing I like about these posts is that, for the most part, people who disagree are being respectful and listening to other opinions. That gives me hope for CBC. It also reinforces my appreciation for Chuck Ayers. CBC got so big because lots of different people were joining for lots of different reasons. Maybe everyone wasn’t always perfectly happy with the club’s priorities, but Chuck did a pretty good job of balancing lots of different interests. This shouldn’t be underestimated. I hope the board and Chuck can take note of the tone of this dialogue and and relearn how to work together. Let’s bring back Chuck as ED!
Already happened, see new thread above.
Michael – I appreciate the historical perspective … but it seems like membership is up, even as it feels like the rides program has dwindled. I joined for no other reason than the advocacy and education arms, and there must be others like me. I think it would be hard to dismantle those arms at this point. Should the Club Rides part of CBC split off and go back to being a happy, volunteer effort? Might be too late for that too, seeing how big the annual rides have gotten, at least.
Julian, I think you are asking the right question and to some degree the rides part has already been split off (Seattle Bicycle Club, West Seattle Touring Club and others). I guess the question becomes is CBC the right vehicle to continue to promote regular rides, etc. The infrastucture (Web page, Ride Calander, Courier) is great but in this digital age easily re-created. The fact that the Board has decided to hire a Rides Coordinator is maybe a step in the right direction, or maybe a just throwing a dog a bone or a way to bring the ride leaders (an otherwise completely volunteer operation) under control of the Board. I am not close enough to the situation to know, but I am sure that some who are reading this blog do. No offense to you Julian but the “avocacy first” members are as I have said above inherently fickle as they have only their checks invested in the Club and little sweat equity invested as do the ride leaders (who also tend to volunteer for lots of the other stuff anyway). The advocacy first people can send their check to another organization tomorrow without missing a beat.
I do know this, if you loose the club rides people you will probably loose 3,000 members. I think the advocacy people long ago figured this out and determined that the club could afford to loose them considering the numbers that would be picked up by becoming an advocacy organization. Obviously they were right. Nevertheless, the inevitable seems to be happening and I just hope everyone sees where this is going and is OK with that. Seems like you are.
I was shocked and disheartened to learn that Chuck Ayers had lost his position as ED.
It was because of his work that I joined and continued to support this organization.
Maybe he grew CBC until it is just too big to be viable.
Chuck has many friends who will not be happy to see this change.
I hope this doesn’t hurt the advocacy efforts that he helped charge.
Good luck.
No offense taken – you’re completely correct. My sweat equity is in my family cycling blog and organizing Kidical Mass rides, Fiets of Parenthood, and other non-CBC events. If Cascade stops being an effective tool for education and advocacy, I’m outta here. But folks like me are not just check writers, and we don’t save our rides for the weekend, or need a club to organize them for us. We’re invested in cycling because we’re riding every day, in conditions that could be a lot better.
And it sure seems like a misuse of a 13,000-member cycling organization to not use that significant influence to substantially improve conditions, laws, and infrastructure for cyclists in the Puget Sound and WA State, well beyond keeping the shoulder clean.
To restrict it to a merely recreational function seems like a big waste to me. Anyone can organize a ride these days (not an STP, of course, but the stuff it sounds like you miss).
But by ourselves it’s hard to get anything done on a local or state level when it comes to advocacy. I want Cascade to help get others back on their bikes, on our roads, replacing ridiculous 1-2 mile car trips, increasing ridership and safety in numbers, get kids biking to school again, and to help shift the culture a bit … ambitious, yes, but it’s the largest freaking cycling club in the country. We can and should do more than ride in circles.
If you had attended the recent BikePAC, you would have been treated to an interesting combination of elected officials (national and local), seven members of the Cascade Board, many Cascade Staff members, and many people like us ordinary bicycle folk who are involved with bicycling. This was all the more interesting because of the fiasco recently perpetrated by the Board, and it provided those Board members with a chance to really see advocacy in action.
With the PAC, I as a bicyclist can meet and support those officials who can pave the way for safe, bicycle-friendly communities, or discover those who may get in the way of that. We bicyclists deserve to know which candidates support bike-friendly communities so that we can hold them accountable to their promises and for their actions. That was the theme that was presented at BikePAC, and that is what the Board saw firsthand (the first time for many of them at an event such as this).
I’ll have to admit, however, that my purpose for being there was to observe some of the interaction taking place, and seeing and meeting some of the players involved. David Hiller ran the program and did a superb job of introducing everyone and putting the event in perspective. When Chuck Ayers was introduced, he was invited to talk and then gave a brilliant and invigorating speech that stressed the need to back those bicycle friendly politicians, many who were in the audience. After his speech, the boisterous, resounding and sustained applause he received could not have been more deafening to the ears of Board members.
I did make it a point to meet and introduce myself to Chris Weiss (Board President who wrote the “Message to Members” above) to try and understand more of what he and the Board were thinking with their sudden and startling recent announcement in regard to the ED. Frankly, I realized that I was talking to a man who had the credentials to be on the board, which he constantly attempted to impress on me, but he refused to admit the fact that maybe the Board could have handled the situation with Chuck a bit differently. When I mentioned that many members view the recent action as extremely naïve and that it gave evidence of being “out of touch” with the membership, I was met with a blank stare and then a comment that the Board had been trying to resolve the differences with Chuck for months. When I told him that many in the membership see the current General Election Ballot as a “sham” by the Board and that the membership really has no choice in the upcoming election, he simply indicated that the members need to refer to the by-laws. When I suggested that, for the good of the club, it would be an appropriate gesture for him to remove his name from the ballot, his answer was that Chuck recruited him for the Board and that Chuck approved him to be on the ballot.
I did not get a chance to tell Chris that the way he and the Board conducted the ED firing, along with the statements he made to the Puget Sound Business Journal was drastically more damaging to the club than any “heartburn” endured by Board members via comments made by David Hiller. I also did not get a chance to state to him that it might be far better, for the sake of the club, that certain Board members just quietly resign and fade away, rather than face an ugly recall which would further damage our club and turn away valuable club sponsors. Would it be possible that several major sponsors are “now on the fence”? Personally, I feel that it is a shame that the club now has an obvious conflict involving egos, where certain naïve Board members feel that they are more important than the club membership.
I have been a member of Cascade for three years, since moving up from Portland. In all that time, I have seen the club shift to in your face activism from Dave Hiller, and large font headlines in the CBC newsletter about all of the success and hard work that the club’s advocacy and lobbying have won down in Olympia.
I do not think age and type of riding differences are the divisive elements within CBC members or Leadership. In my opinion, it is class issues, and a mentality of competitiveness and entitlement that is inherent with elite bicycling, and/or white male privilege. I would never consider CBC a bikes as transportation community unto itself, and if ever the club needed friends, now would be a good time to truly embrace the community that would be strengthened by their numbers and resources.
Seriously. Everyone who writes for the CBC Website and paper articles RARELY to NEVER mention all of the other advocates and organizations who are working for safe roads for all here in the Puget Sound region and Washington State. The “Share the Road” Campaigns and education outreach, the Safe Routes to School National partnership, changes in DOL drivers education to include bicyclists as accepted and legal users of roadways, are not a proprietary brand or product—yet to here CBC tell it, the club is the center of the universe on all of these good works.
The absence of coalition building aside, in general within the CBC rhetoric and every post I have read since the shake up, there is a truly telling and noteworthy omission of the advocacy world outside of CBC: The Bicycle Alliance of Washington has been far less less flashy and much less caustic in their hard work over the last twenty years; to build productive relationships and the hard earned street credibility in the Capitol.
Then there are the those on the front-lines of bike/ped education with which Bike-All builds the power base to reach and teach legislators and citizens—-Bikeworks, Feet First to name a couple.
CBC can choose to cease the shouting and finger pointing all around. Instead of knee jerk and recant decision making, choose to step away from power struggles. CBC needs a make over in strategic planning, focusing on building alliances and real leadership of a much larger movement for safe roads for all.
Honestly ED, aren’t these other groups you mentioned sufficient to carry the advocacy lead and load? Might Cascade get by with only a representative to these other groups (it actually was that way for a very brief period of time)? True enough, in the old days there only was Cascade to get the sewer grates to go the right way, but as you point out now things are different. There are acutally now paid employees at City Hall who’s job it is to pay attention to these things. Why all the duplicative efforts? The answer to that question will be left as an exercize for the class.
This discussion must come to an end but I would like to make one point publically. I do not know Chuck Ayers well personally nor do I understand his disagreements with the Board as I am merely a humble former ride leader. But I have met Chuck and talked to him on numerous occasions over the years including on a number of rides. I have discussed issues with him by e-mail on various occasions, even when I was not a member in protest. Chuck was always more than courteous when we did not agree and more generous with his time than he needed to be, or probably could afford to be. It was always clear to me that he took his responsibilities very seriously and worked tirelessly for the Club. Holding this group together was a big ballancing trick and he seemed to do it well. I think the real issue here is not whether his firing (and subsequent re-hiring!) was handled well or poorly (although I am sure Chuck thinks it is an important issue) as I am more concerned with results rather than process. Nevertheless, what does Chuck being rejected by the Board tell us about the leadership of the club that represents us and works for us? What does the current ballot tell us about our voice in the club that we own? Why all the focus on generating revenue (e.g. STP training rides to have a fee)? To me, those are the more important questions. One could respond, “well managing an operation with 23 employees, a large budget, fundraising, endorsing candidates, running a PAC, etc. is a very complex task and does not lend itself to micromanagement by members, or macromanagement by volunteers” and one would be correct. But, look at the result. Is this what you want? Are you proud of this?
Maybe it is time for the owners of the Club (us) to reconsider what we have created, and whether Frankenstien’s Monster needs to be destroyed and re-made.
Let me know what you think.