My Last Motions to the Board

Kindly put the following eight motions on the agenda for the last
meeting of the current USCF Executive Board

As I and two other board members will be leaving the board and this
will be our last meeting and also because this will be my only board
meeting where there will be a significant audience, I will be making
at least the following eight motions which will in general be repeats
of motions I previously made which were voted down. I want the general
membership to know that at least I tried to set things right during my
one year on the board:

Motion One: Resolved: Executive Director Bill Hall is hereby Censured
and Reprimanded for failing to provide any documents at all pertaining
to the Pension/Profit Sharing Plan.

At my very first meeting on the board on August 14, 2006, I raised the
issue of the Pension/Profit Sharing Plan especially since I had been
informed by a financial insider that there had been misconduct in
connection with the plan, money due and owing under the plan had not
been paid and in one case money had been put into the general
operating account in anticipation of being paid but had never been
paid and had simply been absorbed by operating expenses.

I was told at the August 14 meeting that this was not true and that
everything was hunky dory now, but nevertheless I continued to press
for documents pertaining to the plan. Also, there was a report that
one former employee was paid twice or double-paid.

Since then, at every meeting of the board and in numerous BINFOS in
between meetings, I have demanded documents pertaining to the plan.
There have been persistent reports of people being owed money and not
being paid and conversely of people being paid money that they were
NOT entitled to receive.

As of yet, I have not received any documents at all, not even one
sheet of paper, in spite of my persistent requests for documents. It
is obvious that our Executive Director Bill Hall is stonewalling and
has no intention and has never had any intention of sending me any
documents.

This is not a minor matter. As a member of the board, I am a trustee
of the plan which means that there could be criminal penalties
including JAIL TIME for failing to play former employees the pensions
to which they are entitled. By making this motion I want to have it on
the record that I am in no way involved in this and that if anybody
goes to jail it will be the other board members and not me.

Motion Two: Bobby Fischer USCF Membership

The by-laws passed twice the last time being in 1992 on a motion by
Joe Lux states that all chess players recognized by FIDE as USA
Grandmasters are USCF members.

As can be seen on the FIDE website, Bobby Fischer is listed as a USA
Grandmaster:
http://www.fide.com/ratings/card.phtml?event=2000016

It is the ultimate arrogance of this board that it has ignored this
delegate mandate. This shows the disregard that members of this board
have consistently displayed towards the rules as set forth by the
delegates. To date, Bobby Fischer still is not listed on the
USCHESS.ORG website as a USCF member. In particular, Mr. Goichberg and
Mr. Channing have spoken against listing Mr. Fischer as a USCF member.

I note that my first motion on this matter was passed at the meeting
on August 14, 2006. Robert Tanner and Beatriz Marinello voted in favor
and it passed. At the next meeting in Stamford Connecticut, I noted
that it still has not been implemented and called for another vote on
this. However, Robert Tanner by then had left the meeting early and
without his vote it failed. Mr. Tanner resigned shortly thereafter.

It is obvious and apparent that it is due to personal prejudices that
Mr. Goichberg and Mr. Channing have towards Mr. Fischer that they keep
voting against this motion and therefore it fails. I am renewing this
motion so that the entire world can witness the prejudices that Mr.
Goichberg and Mr. Channing hold which stops them from carrying out
their duties towards Mr. Fischer and towards chess in general.

Motion Three: Larry Evans Issue

The first act of our current editor Dan Lucas was to fire Larry Evans,
who is the most popular columnist the USCF ever had and who has been a
regular columnist in Chess Life since January 1953. It is apparent
that this firing was because one member of the board who is close to
Mr. Lucas does not like Larry Evans. At each meeting of the board, Mr.
Lucas has been politely asked by the other board members to fully
reinstate Larry Evans, yet the editor has refused to do. With this
motion, we are no longer asking, we are directly ORDERING the Chess
Life editor to fully reinstate Grandmaster Evans. If Mr. Lucas still
refuses to reinstate Grandmaster Evans, he can look for another job.

Motion Four: Ratings of Olympiads and Other Major Events

The major point in my grand plan to increase the reach of the USCF and
ultimately to bring us more members and more money is to bring into
the rating system the major international events, like the World
Championship events, major tournaments like the Aeroflot Open and the
Reykjavik Open and the Olympiads. The purpose is to give all the top
level super-grandmasters in the world a USCF rating and ID number,
thereby encouraging those players to come to the US and compete in our
tournaments and also to increase the prestige of our rating system.
There is also a secondary purpose which is to discourage some of these
foreign top level players from sneaking into the lower class sections
of our tournaments to win big money.

Not only will this bring us more prestige, it will bring us more
money. Already several of the First Saturday tournaments in Budapest
Hungary have been USCF rated and the organizer there, Mr. Nagy, has
stated that he will gladly pay rating fees to have all of his
tournaments rated. There is no doubt that many organizers around the
world will be more than willing to pay rating fees to have their
tournaments rated. I have spoken to Walter Brown (not the grandmaster)
who would be the one doing the actual work on this project and he
states that he would be willing to do this and this would not be a
problem. The fact that the board keeps voting this down in spite of
the obvious benefits demonstrates in my view the small mindedness,
narrow mindedness and lack of imagination that this board has.

Motion Five: The Executive Director is hereby directed to purchase a
three-chip camcorder which will be a SONY 2100 or equivalent at an
estimated cost of less than $2300 and will be used to video broadcast
on youtube and elsewhere meetings of the board and major events such
as the National Elementary Championship. The purpose of this
expenditure will be both to give the general membership the impression
(however false) that the board is trying its best to deal with the
problems facing the federation and to promote our events and get more
kids to play.

I made this motion at the meeting in Stamford. It was not voted on
because Bill Hall agreed to do it. Like everything else that Bill Hall
agreed to do, it was never done, and thus I am making this motion
again.

Motion Five: Bill Hall Censured for failing to provide the tapes of
the August and November board meetings to Terry Vibbert for posting on
the website and also commending Terry Vibbert for his fine work in
posting all of the May meeting and part of the February meeting on the
website.

A lot of things happened during the August and November meetings and I
can fully understand why Mr. Hall would be embarrassed by those events
and would want to cover them up. However, we want to lure the general
membership into the belief that it is not the board that is engaged in
a cover up and so therefore I move that we censure Bill Hall.

Motion Six: Irina Krush Tournament of Girl Champions

Irina Krush is our highest rated active woman tournament player and
our champion and at age 23 she is rapidly improving. How many people
even know that she defeated US Champion Alexander Shabalov in a
tournament game in June? She has had a tremendous streak of
spectacular tournament results this past year and she is getting
better all the time. Therefore, I move that the USCF Establish an
Irina Krush Tournament of Girl Champions to be played every year at
the same time and location as the US Open Championship and the Denker
Tournament.

Motion Seven: Censure Bill Hall for failing to conduct and report an
inventory of USCF Files and Records and Commending and thanking Donna
Alarie for her efforts to recover the records.

During my first meeting of the board on August 14, 2006, it was
revealed that almost all financial records and other records of the
USCF are lost or destroyed. Bill Hall later stated that 125 storage
boxes has been located in a storage bin in Crossville. In a BINFO,
Bill Hall was directed by the VP of Finance Joel Channing to take an
inventory of the contents of these storage boxes and provide this
inventory to the board.

Bill Hall never did it.

Donna Alarie went through some of the storage boxes in the storage bin
in January and found that they were covered with dust and dirt and
obviously had not been looked at in a long time.

I hereby move that Bill Hall be censured for failing even to begin to
carry out this directive from the board and to thank Donna Alarie, an
unpaid volunteer, for attempting to do the job that Bill Hall was
being paid to do but did not do.

Also, a well-known grandmaster has asked me to locate the Quark
Express files for his Chess Life columns that he wants to make into a
book. I have been reliably informed that these computer files are in
the Crossville Landfill. I hereby request that someone be sent to the
landfill to recover the files on behalf of the grandmaster. Also, I
would like to know what happened to the morgue of old photographs and
other documents to be used in Chess Life which were previously in New
Windsor until that office was closed by order of Joel Channing. Are
those files in the Landfill too?

Motion Eight: Commenting Tim Tobiason for scanning and converting to
DVD format back issues of Chess Life newspaper.

Many USCF members do not know that from 1946 to 1960 Chess Life was
not a magazine but was a bi-monthly newspaper. At the November Board
Meeting in Stamford, I got a motion passed authorizing John Donaldson
to authorize Tim Tobiason to scan all the issues of Chess Life
newspaper. I want to mention that there was some opposition to my plan
but I managed to get the votes to get it passed. Now, Mr. Tobiason has
completed or nearly completed the job and I move to commend Mr.
Tobiason for doing this job and thereby recovering these documents
which are important to chess history and to the history of the USCF.

Please put these eight motions on the agenda.

Sam Sloan