Yah, every year around this time I meet up with an old friend and gold-tab scouter who comes into the area to visit family for a special event or reunion that they have about now. Gives us a good excuse to catch up and share scoutin' tales.

Talkin' to him over brunch this mornin', we got to chatting about the Michigan Area 2 project, since we're both Central Region fellows. Folks here might know this past year there was an effort to merge all the councils in Central Region Area 2 (Michigan) into one Greater Michigan Council, which got approved in the fall and has been in process. He was describin' how much investment national was makin' in the new effort, includin' big costs in database reconfigurations and other efforts to accommodate this new structure, as well as some significant changes to the professional development / promotion pathways for executives to match the new configuration. As some of yeh may know that stuff tends to be the prime mover behind a lot of executive action. I was curious about that since it seems like a lot of effort for a one-off.

Turns out that National is not seeing the Area 2 Project as a one-off, but as a strong model for the future. Most of us here know that Irving has been quietly encouraging council mergers for some time, but typically only between two councils here, two councils there sort of thing like the recent Kentucky merger. The apparent success of da Michigan effort which merged 9 councils all at once has opened their eyes to new possibilities, and the exec from Area 2 (who came from Massachusetts I believe, where council mergers and camp closings were also a topic) is seen as a rising star. The Michigan model is being seen as a much faster and more effective way to consolidate operations.

So word on the street is that National is settin' up to try to scale this up by pushing for a test-case Area-wide merger in each of the Regions. They figure if they can get this goin' in multiple areas of the country it will give 'em more information and become a snowball sort of thing. Right now he's thinkin' that the likely places for big multi-council mergers are:

Northeast
New Jersey (Area 5) or
New England seacoast of Maine/New Hampshire/Massachusetts (Area 1)

Southern
Florida (Area 4) or
Oklahoma/Arkansas (Area 8)

Western
Northern California & Nevada (Area 3) or
the Southwest States (Area 6) without the Hawaiian folks.

The guess is that for legal and other reasons there might be an advantage to the state-boundaries thing, so merging all of Florida into one council and all of Northern California seems like the most attractive in those two areas, with Northeast being the test case for a cross-state merger (cross-state mergers are a bit harder because the council corporations are incorporated in different states, which takes a bit more work).

The plan is that they're currently layin' the groundwork with the regional and area execs, with an intention to do the same sort of fast-blitz of the volunteers that was done in Michigan to get approval without providin' a whole lot of details on things that get people's dander up (like which camps will be kept and which sold, which service centers will be closed and all that stuff). Roll out looks like it might be pretty quick.

So could be by this particular day next year, we'll be seein' the same sort of statewide merger votes in Florida, northern California and New Jersey that we saw in Michigan last fall. Or maybe some other cockamamie notion.

I'm curious if folks volunteerin' in these places have heard anything yet about these plans? Or any other amusin' changes comin' down the pike for that matter.

Beavah