Mood:
brightTopic: Sale of Scout Camps
July 17, 2006
The White Lake Beacon
by Debra Carte
The party’s not over for the Owasippe Scout Reservation, not by a long shot, say Scouters and “Save Owasippe” supporters fighting to make sure the camp sees many more years beyond the 95 they celebrated last Wednesday.
“Save that banner and be prepared to put ‘100th’ there,” said Jim Schlichting, assistant development director for the Owasippe Outdoor Education Center (OOEC), as he pointed toward the large banner placed at the camp Wednesday to commemorate its 95 years of continued operation.
Schlichting and the OOEC, the non-profit organization working to preserve the camp as a year-round learning and conference center, have good reason to hope a sale of Owasippe can be stopped despite the Chicago Area Council of the Boy Scouts’ best efforts to sell it to a Holland area banker for $19.4 million.
The National Council of the Boy Scouts recently intervened in the contested business affairs of the Chicago Council and went as far as to dissolve its executive committee and appoint an interim one until elections can be held in January.
On Friday, the board of directors of the Chicago Area Council unanimously elected the executive committee proposed by the National Council and named John C. “Jack” Jadel as council president. Jadel replaces Lewis Greenblatt, who was asked by council to step down from the board. Jadel is the former president of the Northeast Illinois Council of the Boy Scouts, president of the National Eagle Scout Association and past president of Akzo America.
The good news of the shakeup is that National has charged the new committee with reviewing their predecessors’ business dealings and controversial decisions, including the pending sale of Owasippe.
That could mean three things, according to Joe Sener, chairman of the OOEC and one of 11 Scouters who prevailed in a lawsuit against the Chicago Council for violations of council bylaws and the Illinois Not-for-Profit Corporation Act.
“They could decide to go ahead with the sale, or entertain other proposals, like the OOEC’s, or not sell at all,” he said last Wednesday while attending Owasippe’s 95th birthday.
“National could see that the pending sale of Owasippe was an extremely hot issue for the [CAC] volunteers, and if that was going to be a
polarizing event, they wanted to see if the right decisions have been made.”
Sener didn’t hold back when commenting on how he perceives the past decision-making of the Chicago Council’s board.
“Deciding to sell all the capital assets of the council in order to balance the books is stupid,” he said. Sener is in his 42nd year at Camp Owasippe and served as chairman of the Chicago Council’s Owasippe Committee, but he and five others were considered by National to be “lightning rods” for the opposing parties in the Chicago Council dispute and were asked to step down from the board of directors and all committees.
Sener isn’t giving up in getting an open dialogue going on the future of Owasippe and has invited those now in charge in Chicago to learn more about the camp that’s served hundreds of thousands of youths since 1911.
“My plan is to continue to focus on Owasippe. Camping has been my life and my major contribution to the council,” he said. “I’ll let the executive committee do what they’ve been chartered to do and,
hopefully, bring some sanity to what’s been going on.”
The only member of the new executive committee to attend Owasippe’s 95th anniversary celebration on Wednesday was another of the Scouter-11, Jim Adamitis, who had joined Sener and nine others in a lawsuit against the Chicago Council. Adamitis would not comment on the review of the pending sale of Owasippe, but did say he believed there would
be a resolution.
“I am deeply of a mind that things work out for the very best for the council and for the community,” he said.
The Chicago Council’s Scout Executive, Jim Stone, said Wednesday at Owasippe that the council is accepting reservations from Scouters for the 2007 camping season, but “I can’t speak to beyond that,” he added.
