9-17-12 Response to CCC Message 0480 If you check out the “Dues Increase” post on the NCChess.org forum, if you look at the 3rd and 4th messages, the latter one mine, here we are questioning what productive use the increase will have.  Then Gary encourages the increase, expecting a “leap of faith” from members, pretty much ignoring messages 3 and 4.  There’s no disclosure what-so-ever of where this money goes.  He practically hired the new president, and you read the President’s first message in this thread, second from the bottom of the first page, here he is saying that he’s got typos in his dates.  Uhm, you’re only the PRESIDENT!  Least you can do is PROOFREAD what you type!  Secondly, he says in response to those that paid multiple years in advance that “For those who have already paid advanced multiple years I feel an adjustment could be made”.  Uhm, first off, run-on sentence.  If you are the president, at least sound intelligent and include your punctuation, like commas, maybe.  Secondly, while I haven’t paid for multiple years, for those that have, legally, they are members for that length of time.  If you paid 3 years, you are a member for 3 years, PERIOD.  What’s this “adjustment” BS?  Thirdly, he states “As for those who feel what about the ones who have paid between January and September, when changes are made, some may lose and some may gain.”  Once again, BS.  I renewed in April.  That payment was a legal agreement that I am a member in good standing of the NCCA thru April of 2013.  Now you want me to pay even more money at an earlier time than I’m legally due to an organization that is in effect corrupt? If the NCCA and both its current and former officers from 2009 onward have nothing to hide, and didn’t do any illegal activity, WHAT HAVE YOU GOT TO HIDE??  If a current NCCA member (which Leland was at that time) requests seeing the financial statements, he or she should have every right to see them.  We pay you money (and now you want more), and you won’t tell us what you are doing with it?  Something doesn’t seem right when there is a smoke screen separating us from the officers, we pay them now $10 per year, and what exactly do they do?  An occasional update to a Website (and I emphasize occasional, I’ve seen upcoming tournaments be as many as 3 weeks behind at times), and running 1 tournament (The NC Open), doesn’t constitute a year’s worth of hard work in my book.  Instead, you are forcing us to pay $10 each year to play in other people’s tournaments!  So we have to pay 3 or 4 people behind a concealed wall $10 each per year to play in tournaments ran by Tom Hales, Jeff Jones, and others that have no current association with the Officer Seats of the NCCA.  Then, on top of that, the “officers” want to pull money out of their pockets as well, forcing people to pay back money to NCCA members.  So what this amounts to is tournament organizers are feeding the pockets of 3 or 4 officers.  With no public account statement, how can you possibly expect NCCA members to believe otherwise?  My suggestion is that everyone should save the 2 quarters they get each time from 1-day tournaments for the next year, fill their pockets with them next NC Open, and walk around the tournament hall between moves frequently.  We can “Jingle all the way” thru Labor Day weekend! Patrick McCartney