In October 2019, Dublin Commuter Coalition enacted its constitution.
This process was a bit of Catch-22 as it was difficult to declare what rules would govern the coalition without a constitution and inversely it was difficult to decide on rules to enact the constitution and by whom, without a membership.
We decided to enact the constitution, elect a committee and then begin working on developing a system of membership. This is a large and complex undertaking that includes setting up a bank account, developing databases and data protection guidelines.
Unfortunately, the onset of the pandemic very severely impacted our collective ability to meet this goal.
A provision of the constitution is that AGMs must be held within 15 months of the previous and that certain committee roles must be reopened for election every year. Following this rule would have meant that we would hold an AGM, at the latest, on January 26th 2021. However, considering we have not been able to develop a consistent membership structure or income stream, we felt it would be counterproductive to hold another election without consistent rules in place enabling a free and fair election by people who have become members and therefore entitled to the right to vote.
It is for this reason that I, Kevin Carter, in my position as Chairperson, with the additional support of the Committee, have made the executive decision to withhold the Annual General Meeting for the foreseeable future.
I have made this decision under the following provision of the constitution:
9.4 The quorum for general meetings shall be at least 5 members.
Seeing as we have no members at present, I believe I am still following it as best as is possible considering the situation.
In place of preparing for an AGM, we will begin a rapid feedback campaign over the next two days to get your input on the review for the Dublin Transport Strategy.
When that deadline has passed our No. 1 priority will be the development of our membership system. We envisage no more large scale public consultations on transport projects in the near future so will use this time to refocus on our own systems.
Dublin Commuter Coalition is still a very young organisation and it goes without saying that the pandemic has severely hampered our ability to formalise ourselves as well as impacting the committee on an individual basis, as we all have lives and families to consider too.
But we will endeavour to make sure our organisation follows the ideals of openness, transparency and fairness and hope that you understand that this decision was made due to the unparalleled situation we all find ourselves in.
Le meas,
Kevin Carter
Chairperson
DUBLIN COMMUTER COALITION
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