John – as you implied.
They had the ability and authority to change the whole slate of
Officers.
All they decided to do was get up, get out their keys, get into their
cars, and drive back home.
It was their choice.
The By-Laws forced another committee to do their Job for Them.
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Brother John,
Both camps decided.
One group wanted a new President
(I will agree that they did not decide on who they wanted, but they knew who it wasn’t)
The other camp wanted to keep who they had.
(They rejected the decision for change.)
The problem was that the delegates were not prepared before they went to the meeting.
To make a major decision as to the workings of God’s church
much prayer and soul searching needs to be done beforehand.
And failing to reach unity of spirit, put a default mechanism in play.
In Bible times, they prayed for unity, placed it in God’s hands
(and cast lots to let God have the final say)
Would that be like:
buying a few lottery tickets
praying over them
placing the candidates names on them
And the one that wins the most cash is God’s choice to be Conference President?
no winners?
get some new names and do it again?
preposterous
then send it off to a committee that has an agenda!
That’s not how it works.
Here’s an excerpt from the Spectrum post from Bonnie Dwyer, who was there:
Conference President Ramiro Cano’s name was not brought to the floor for a vote. Instead, the Nominating Committee recommended Elden Ramirez, president of the Montana Conference, known in Central California from the time that he spent as assistant to the CCC president and Director of Youth Ministries. He left California to become the Director of the Office of Volunteer Ministries for the North American Division of the General Conference, and from there went to the Montana Conference. The first motion of the day was to send the Nominating Committee Report back to the committee and allow for delegates to speak to the committee. It passed overwhelmingly, followed by several positive speeches on behalf of Cano. Then 74 people followed the Nominating Committee to the library where over the next several hours the committee listened to comments, but did not change their recommendation for president. Then the constituents of the Central California Conference voted down Ramirez’s nomination to be president with 361 opposed to 209 in favor.
…The Nominating Committee then needed to be quickly reconvened to approve a new name for president and for the vice president for ministries position.
…[later] Ricardo Graham, president of the Pacific Union Conference and the chair of the Nominating Committee, announced that the Nominating Committee did not have a name to recommend for president.
There was no ‘inability’ of those wanting change. The Nominating Committee’s recommended person, Elden Ramirez, was soundly rejected by a vote. And then they didn’t come up with another name.
IMO this shows what a kangaroo court our system is: Delegates are given one name to vote on, from a committee that is led not by the Conference’s President, but by the Union’s President (what?!?), and they are expected to vote yes. If they vote no, then there is no election. It’s like “voting” in a dictatorship where there is one name on the ballot.
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They all know going in what the bylaws are. If they don’t they are remiss in their responsibility as delegates. The process worked exactly the way it was designed to work, as voted by the constituency when they voted the bylaws into place. Nothing preposterous about it. If they decide they don’t like the results of their decision then they bear the responsibility to change the bylaws, and thus the process, otherwise there’s nothing whatsoever to complain about other than their own ignorance as delegates.
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I don’t think you can know then things you are stating as if fact.
How do you know? You can’t, I think, because they never voted where the existing president was a candidate. The nominating committee precluded that possibility by only presenting a different candidate.
They were prepared to vote no for Elden Ramirez. And they did. They were never presented with another opportunity to vote for president.
They were not asked to be unified in spirit. All they did was reject the one candidate they didn’t want.
Yes, one biblical example of how to discern God’s will is to cast lots. For some reason we don’t do that much in the SDA church. Maybe you’re suggesting we should.
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Good idea. Maybe we can cast lots to see who needs to be stoned while we’re at it. Haven’t had a good stoning in Adventism yet. Let’s get back to the Bible and have one, if for no other reason than old time’s sake.
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Sign me up. I like being stoned now and then.
You’ve never seen stoned Adventists? Maybe you need to spend more time at Adventist high schools. When I was in boarding school, there were literally stonings everywhere - seemed like every day. The dean seemed oblivious.
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Well, yes! But I was a good little boy at boarding school so while I knew of such stonings I was careful to steer clear! Haha 
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Righhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht.
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It’s good to be believed…
And it’s actually true! I took the Smoking Sam dummy from the conference youth director and the Smoke Signals magazines sent to all conference school students to heart. My vices were worse. Self-hatred, suicidal ideation, self harm, I’d have been better off with the weed by a long shot. It could have ameliorated the other.
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At a boarding school where I worked, one of the guys was
“selling” a white pill.
The dean obtained one. It was a generic Vitamin C he was
passing off for something stronger.
We interrupted his flow of cash-- LOL!
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With a supportive ExCom, Pr. Cano was able to ride out the storm for the moment, but the memory of the constituency meeting will linger. However, five years is a long time to keep the opposition fires burning. So I predict that Pr. Cano will retire with canhonor either at the end of this five year term or just prior to it, if it looks ugly. (I’m just working the math–married for 40 years.) His chances of getting a call to another conference are remote unless he is well networked–he’s twenty years in one conf.
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It looks like we are saying the same thing. The man that the constituents soundly rejected got put in office by the good old boys club in spite of the will of the people being expressed.
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I agree with you , in 2010 Cano had been married for more than 40 years . The man is in his 70’s . I am sure his appeal to the executive committee was “ I am an old man and I didn’t save for retirement and I am like the old wine “ and he made some promises to end nepotism , to reclaim lost members , to bring unity to the conference by being ultra conservative in The Valley and super liberal In the Bay Area.
I don’t see that. They rejected the candidate presented to them, Elden Ramirez. He didn’t get put into office after they rejected him. Instead the existing president did.
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Tim –
The committee must have felt impotent, by not putting up a name or
two of their own to vote.
Also, the Union was not farsighted. They only offered one person to
consider on the slate for consideration.
The committee rebelled against Rubber Stamping some other Committee’s
decision on that.
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Tim,
I have not read this thread much, but am I understanding this correctly?
- The Nominating Committee suggested Cano for re-election.
- The Constituents rejected him, by voting (big defeat!)
- The Nom Com did not choose other name
- Therefore he was actually installed by the Nom Com, against the will of the Constituents.
Is this what actually happened? Please help me to organize my understanding of this event.
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Here’s what happened:
-
The Nominating Committee recommended Elden Ramirez, president of the Montana Conference. He has served in the CCC before so the voting constituents probably know his M.O.
-
The Constituents rejected Ramirez, voting no by a wide margin.
-
The Nominating Committee reconvened during the day to address this. Later, while they did for other positions, they did not make another recommendation for President. It seems they could not agree on another name. (It also seems that coming up with another name in a matter of hours is an impractical/impossible task, unless you had previously groomed several people before the meeting who you knew would be willing to take the role - and they probably didn’t do that.)
-
Because the meeting ended without electing a President, and there is no recourse to convene again (it is an annual meeting), the process to name a President apparently has a fall back.
-
At some later date, through some process I don’t understand, that fell to the Nominating Committee to name a President for the next term. And they named Cano, the sitting president.
I have heard that there is a small, vocal, relatively rich, generously-tithing and highly-conservative faction in the CCC that is never happy if any leader makes a progressive move. Cano, for better or worse, has been fence-sitting for years, trying to bridge the gap between the progressive SF Bay Area and the conservative members in Fresno and the rest of the Central Valley.
This infuriates the conservatives, who want him out. He upsets the progressives as he won’t approve WO - though it is supported in the PUC - and he and his underlings force teachers to pay tithe as a condition of their employment. They have even recast the teachers a clergy - legally - so they can get away with it. But the progressives in the bay area are too busy and really can’t be bothered too much with this stuff, and so, as usual, the conservatives get their way.
I’m not sure what to make of the Nominating Committee’s choice of Elden Ramirez. I suspect that the bulk of the committee are volunteers from Fresno, where the CCC offices are, and they want him back. He’s from Central America, I think, and is very conservative. He used to be the Youth Leader for the CCC (not sure of the official position’s title) and I’d see him at Pathfinder events. I called him “puppet man” because he had this little purple Muppet-like hand puppet that he’d use during sermons for the kids. The Muppet had a hard time figuring out the difference between good and bad things which Elden would explain to him in child-like terms.
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Thank you. I was confused about certain details.
Now I am confused with the whole thing… 
Maneuvers ,like that don’t make it to, “Breaking News”… in this church.They are actually common…
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Elder Cano is, apparently, that person. After the majority of the nominating committee recommended another person for this position, who is going to be paying attention to him going forward?
That nominated name was returned to the committee and the process was terminated by the clock without a president being voted by the constituency. Thus his executive committee returned him to office for another five years.
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