THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, March 23, 1996 TAG: 9603230046
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 211 lines
ALL SEEMED business-as-usual that January night.
Homeowners from Norfolk's Colonial Place neighborhood filed into the church social hall as they always did on the third Monday of the month, took seats, eyeballed the agenda.
It was a mix of old and new business, of matters small and very small, typical fare for a meeting of a civic league's board of directors. Only one detail provided a hint as to what lay ahead: a typo in the agenda's first item of business.
``Suspend with Roberts Rules for this secession,'' it read.
Dan Gentile, the civic league's president, called the meeting to order. Then, suddenly, he and his fellow officers were venting frustration, pain. They fired broadsides at other board members. One said her colleagues had wounded her soul. Another said she'd been slandered.
Then, one by one, eight of the 15 officers of the Colonial Place/Riverview Civic League quit and walked out.
Drama made a rare visit to an organization usually devoted to such pedestrian concerns as lawn maintenance and on-street parking, noisy neighbors and barking dogs.
The visit left the league without its president, vice president and most of its committee heads. It spawned a new organization that threatens to compete with the civic league for the neighborhood's loyalty.
As for what led to the drama, well, there may be as many opinions on that as there are residents in this neighborhood of shady streets and comfortable old homes bordering the Lafayette River.
``I don't have a clue why they quit,'' said Jim Akers, the league's treasurer before and after the split. ``It baffled us all.''
``What we had was a puppet government,'' countered Janet Farrar, one of those who walked. ``It smelled like a puppet government. It looked like a puppet government.''
The seeds of the trouble were sown last spring, when neighbors persuaded Dan Gentile to seek the league's presidency.
The 28-year-old Navy officer wasn't even a member, but he'd recently pitched in on efforts to clean up his street, and he'd enjoyed it. In May, he joined the league and, despite his inexperience, won its top post.
Jim Akers, long a league wheel, offered to help Gentile acclimate to his new role. ``He would draft up all kinds of letters and recommendations, telling us we needed to do this, we needed to do that,'' Gentile said recently. ``I had no idea that the civic league had any real rules or regulations. I just thought it was a group of people who got together for the betterment of the place.
``So I listened to his advice.''
There was a lot of it. Akers introduced him to the group's bylaws and to Roberts Rules of Order, the standard handbook for running parliamentary meetings. He offered his own list of league priorities. He typed up proposed league policies.
Akers found Gentile and other newcomers full of ideas and energy. ``They were willing to try and keep trying and keep trying,'' he said. ``That's what we needed.''
But as spring turned to summer, their relationship began to sour.
Before his election, Gentile had helped write a petition aimed at having improvements made to his street. It wasn't ready to send to City Hall until early in his presidency.
Told that its cover letter might have more impact coming from the civic league than a loose confederation of homeowners, Gentile reprinted it on league letterhead, leaving its text unchanged.
The result: The letter identified Gentile as the league's president but bore a date on which he had not yet become a member.
That rankled Akers. Accepting that the date was an accident, the fact remained that no one could represent the league on an issue without board OK. The bylaws said so. And the board had never approved the letter.
During the summer, one of the league's committee heads complained about her workload and asked that a co-chair be appointed to share it. Akers balked at that, too, fearing that additional voting members would alter the board's balance of power.
Finally, some board members began pushing a program that put teenagers convicted of non-violent crimes to work - picking up trash and performing other good deeds - in Norfolk neighborhoods.
Akers had grave misgivings about it. ``Our resources could be better spent than with that program,'' he said last week. ``There were some concerns I had, and I was vocal about it.''
Had it been put to a vote, the program would have been approved. But rather than do that, the group decided to bring the matter up before the full membership.
The stage was set for a fight.
It started in earnest in November. Knowing that he was outgunned on the board, Akers passed out written questions about the juvenile-offender program at a meeting of the general membership.
The program's backers were furious: Most of the league had not heard of it, and Akers' questions created doubts about the program even before it had been explained.
The board responded by voting to squelch written opinioneering on the subject until the January 1996 general meeting, when members would hear all the details and the program would be put to a vote.
``You can bring up the argument that this restricts a person's right to free speech,'' Gentile said, ``but to do otherwise also allows one person who always gets his way in the community to get out there and push his views. It actually makes it an undemocratic process.''
It didn't look that way to Akers. ``I could see where he thought someone was trying to pull something over on him,'' said Audra Mitchell, the league's secretary. ``He thought he was being stifled by the board, and I think he was being stifled by the board.''
In December, Akers defied the moratorium. He delivered a flier door-to-door, charging that the board was muzzling him and urging residents to defeat the juvenile program at the January meeting.
``That started a lot of people on the board calling each other up,'' Mitchell said, ``and saying, `Have you seen this? Has he lost his mind?' - that sort of thing.''
Amid this growing acrimony, Gentile and Janet Farrar, the newsletter chair, launched a new project: a league membership brochure and a survey with which they hoped to gauge the neighborhood's attitudes.
Putting both together would cost $295 - well above the $100 the bylaws allowed them to spend without a vote from the membership.
Gentile solved that problem by breaking the expense into line items, seeking $100 or less for various pieces of the job.
Akers did not consent to the spending. ``I don't think anyone, hardly, had seen the brochure,'' he said. ``And only a few people had been involved in putting together the survey.'' Besides, he believed that splitting the expense was an end-run around the league's rule that big spending be approved.
The tension between Akers and Gentile came to a head at the league's general membership meeting Jan. 9. When Gentile started to introduce a guest speaking on the juvenile-offender program, Akers was on his feet.
``Mr. President,'' he said, ``I rise to a point of order.'' He then blasted Gentile and the board on 10 points.
He attacked the moratorium on written dissent. He questioned Gentile's plan to require the more than 60 league members present to show their membership cards before voting on the juvenile program. He brought up Gentile's misdated letter, prompting another league member to demand that the president quit.
When Gentile or others tried to shut Akers down, he used his greater knowledge of Roberts Rules to hold the floor.
``All the board members sat there with their mouths hanging down to their feet, wondering what was going on,'' Farrar said.
``It was loud,'' Mitchell said. ``A lot of people did not know about what was happening. Some people were angry.''
Gentile said, ``There were many people who stood up and said, `I can't believe that the civic league is run this way.' ''
By the meeting's end, the league had voted to keep Gentile on as president but had backed Akers on most of his points.
Was Akers an obstructionist? Was he more interested in pulling the league's strings than he was in helping its neophyte leaders - and, having sensed that his control of the newcomers was slipping, was he now trying to upend them?
So goes one view. Another holds that Gentile and his inexperienced allies could not be bothered to follow their group's own rules, and that Akers became an enemy when he forced them to stick to the straight and narrow.
Regardless, it was now clear to Gentile and Farrar that as long as Akers was on the board, they'd have to learn Roberts Rules. They'd also have to abide strictly by the bylaws or change them.
Neither choice appealed. ``Our feeling was just that bringing about all the changes we thought needed to be made was too difficult,'' Gentile said. ``It might have been a very long, tedious process in which nothing would have occurred.''
Two other courses presented themselves.
``One of our options was remaining in the civic league, staying in our positions and impeaching Jim Akers,'' Farrar said. ``The disadvantage was that he would still have been in the neighborhood, and he would have been operating outside the civic league.''
The other was to quit and start a second neighborhood group.
He was shocked, Akers said, when Gentile and the others did just that six days after he raised his points at the general meeting.
``We had some problems. Had we not had problems, I would not have done what I did,'' he said, ``but I don't understand the reaction, I really don't.
``The bylaws clearly can be changed and fixed and modified, and they certainly had the people there to do it.''
Mitchell agreed. ``If the people who resigned had stopped and counted, they'd have seen that more people left than stayed,'' she said. ``They could have outvoted the other members of the board at any time. They could have voted to speak only Chinese at the meetings, if they had wanted to.''
Bylaws hassles were no more than a pretext for the resignations, another league member suggested. ``They were against the bylaws only because they had been caught butchering them.''
The civic league today is pretty much where it was a year ago. Akers remains the league's treasurer, Mitchell its secretary. After waiting awhile for the return of the departed, the league elected new officers. Normalcy - or a veneer of it, at least - has returned to its meetings.
``I've tried to stay neutral in all this,'' Mitchell offered, ``because I have a life.''
Gentile and six confederates are now leaders of the Colonial Place Citizen Partnership, a group that professes a desire for ``a simple, hands-on approach to the neighborhood'' in its newsletter.
It does not pretend to be a democratic forum: Residents haven't had a vote on what it might decide to do on their behalf, nor on its leadership. But, unlike the league, it doesn't charge dues and says any resident can become one of its ``partners.''
Perhaps the events of January won't mean much in the long run. The new group may fade away, leaving the civic league the neighborhood's chief advocate.
If that occurs, Colonial Place may have nothing to show for Gentile's brief reign but a smoldering feud between those neighbors who backed him and those who sided with Akers.
Nothing, that is, but a bit less credibility.
Then again, it could be that with two different organizations and so many people now working for its welfare, Colonial Place will actually see something positive come of all this.
And that the leaders of both groups will find themselves agreeing with Arthur MacConochie, a committee leader who stayed with the league.
``Maybe 10 percent of it was a genuine disagreement over the way we do things,'' he said of the split. ``Nine-tenths of it was huff and puff.'' ILLUSTRATION: [Color illustration]
SAM HUNDLEY
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