[WP1] Budget veto questions

[Jonathan Zuck]

Folks
Before we do another draft I wanted to throw out a couple scenarios to get us thinking about what we’re really after with this community power. In Paris we seemed to have reached the consensus that we didn’t want the board to be able to just rest on last year’s budget even though we didn’t want to cut it arbitrarily. I thought we were still there on the latest WP1 call but this morning on the CCWG call, we seemed to go off the rails and folks seem fine with “unlimited round trips” because now it seems sufficient to operate on last year’s budget. I’m afraid that the tight timeframes together with competing issues have gotten us confused on this topic. I thought I would write since this is a power I could imagine us realistically using.

So here’s a scenario: the board approves a million dollars for some internet governance conference. The following year, the community is trying to encourage the board and staff to stick to it’s knitting. The board comes back with a $500k allowance to support the conference the following year. The community vetoes that budget resulting in a continuing resolution to use last year’s budget of $1 mil. The board stands firm through numerous community vetoes and, in the end, gets twice the money they proposed for a program the community wanted eliminated.

Another scenario is one involving the need for an across the board cut in the budget because revenues have not met projections.  The community wants a 20% cut to restore the surplus but the board determines that a 10% cut will suffice because they believe revenues will go back up. Again, a series of unanswered vetoes results in NO cut to the budget.

So I guess my point is that there are several instances where the community would NOT be satisfied by constraining the board to the prior year’s buget. That’s why we were talking about decreasing it (which we agreed would have unpredictable results) but there was a determination that we should break the log jam in favor of the community position.

Given the absence of a community budget creation authority, the veto needs to have teeth and I return to the notion that the number of round trips needs to be limited and somehow include an incentive for the board to comply which might include beginning other proceedings. Steve’s point on the call is that the community could choose to wait until the 4th veto to escalate etc. but that starts to be a long time on last year’s budget in which many commitments could be made from which it would be difficult to extract.

I continue to believe we need measures to break the log jam.

Jonathan


Jonathan Zuck
President
202-331-2130 X 101 | jzuck at actonline.org<mailto:jzuck at actonline.org> | Skype: jvzuck

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