Lodge 19's Recruitment Night

Johnson / Russell Memorial Lodge 19 had their recruitment night last evening at Moe's in Mounds View. They signed up 30 new members, including a large contingent from Forest Lake P.D. In the photo is the lodge's immediate past president, Josh Arneson and the current president, Tom Pitzl. Of course, the people in the middle are my wife and I.

The brothers and sisters of lodge #19 have pledged their support to me for my re-election bid. I am honored by their confidence and do not take it for granted.

Last night's event was extremely well run and very well attended. This is the kind of thing that is going to make the FOP continue to grow. In fact, I spoke to a few people that asked what it took to charter a new lodge.

Thanks again, Johnson / Russell Memorial Lodge - Keep up the good work!

National Standing - Or Maybe Not

The first national conference that I attended was in 1999 in Mobile, Alabama. The logo on the right is actually the logo for the 1997 conference in Orlando. I searched and searched for the Mobile logo, but none could be found. Probably for good reason that I'll discuss some other time.

I was a day late to the conference because of work issues. We had a delegation of 8 people in Mobile. I woke up the first morning and made my way to the conference floor. It took me a while to find our seating area - it was way back in the nosebleed section, next to Maine and Hawaii (who not only do not have state lodges, but no one ever attends a conference). You needed the Hubbell Telescope to see the front stage. Sitting in our area was one lonely guy. I asked where everyone else was. He said that he was the only one who has attended the conference since the start. Everyone else was probably too hung over to make it to the conference - apparently they thought that this was their time to party like it's 1999. He went on to say that, when he got here this morning, the Minnesota banner was laying across the chairs. Someone was expressing their disgust at the lack of our participation. This was the reason we were sitting in the tooleys.

After seeing first hand what prestige - or lack thereof - that we had at the National Level, I resolved to change it.

A Post from the Past

This is a posting from another blog that I had a few years back. This is what we are about. You could fill volumes with stories like these from all over the country. This is just one of them.




Saturday, April 09, 2005

Some Things That You're Happy to Do.




I received a phone call late last night from my North Dakota counterpart (FOP National Trustee). One of his members had been severely burned and was being airlifted to Regions Hospital in St. Paul. His wife was at work when they were putting him on the airplane - she had just enough time to grab her purse, so she basically had the clothes on her back. Another State Board member and I called the burn unit, told the charge nurse that we would be over in the morning and gave all of our phone numbers.She called at 8:00 AM this morning - a little distraught and not sure what to do. My fellow board member's wife (and active auxiliary member) went over right away, and took her to Target to get a weeks worth of clothes, tioletries and luggage. I caught up to the two ladies later in the morning - I figured that our North Dakota wife may become a little tired of hospital chow, so I took her to the St. Paul Grill for lunch. During lunch she mentioned that she was a religious Catholic - so we also stopped at the St. Paul Cathedral and lit a couple of candles.I was actually able to talk to the North Dakota brother - he was conscious and aware - but he was so swollen up that he couldn't speak or even open his eyes...but he could hear me. I told him who I was and that his wife was being taken care of. I told him that the only thing that he needed to worry about was getting better. He gave me a thumbs up. I'm not talking about this to blow my own horn - actually, it was my brother from North Dakota that gave me the gift. I will never forget that hand wrapped in gauze giving me the thumbs up.
posted by Chuck at 11:37 PM

The Minnesota Legal Defense Plan, Part III

The Minnesota LDP was doing great. People were signing up, the handful of cases that came through were handled nicely, the law firm thought that everything was going well, so we thought that we had it made. Well, here's a story of national politics that you may not of heard - and the outcome that actually put us on better footing.

The National Legal Defense Plan was (and still is) a bit of a sacred cow. The Grand Lodge puts a lot of stock into it, and if there is one thing that chaps them, it's the fact that the biggest competitor is other FOP plans. When we started our own plan, it did two things: 1) pull most of the Minnesota membership out of the National Plan, and 2) give ideas to other states. Needless to say, that didn't sit well.

The time for National Committee appointments is a couple of months after the National Conference. After the 2003 conference in Providence, I had two solid and logical candidates for National Committees. I wrote glowing letters. I made a bunch of phone calls. I received assurances. And, in the end, we were skunked.

A source that shall forever remain nameless (someone, shall we say, very highly placed) told me that the reason was probably because of our Legal Defense Plan. I at first didn't think that was likely, so I blew it off.

Fast forward to the National Board Meeting in Philadelphia in April of 2004. While there, the chairman of the Legal Defense Plan Committee pulled me aside. He told me that the legal advisor of the committee (an attorney) was livid - because we had the audacity in one of our websites to call our plan the FOP Legal Defense Plan - which the Grand Lodge had a copyright on. He was making noise about injunctions, etc.

OK, fine - I said. I called Rick Inglima in Missouri - our webmaster at the time - and told him to change the wording to Minnesota Legal Defense Plan. I went back to the chairman and asked him if the had a copyright on Minnesota. I also expressed my disdain about a vendor threatening to take legal action against an FOP entity. Our discussion got a little heated, but when I finally said "look Bob - bottom line is that the National Plan was dropping the ball like a handcuffed NBA player. I have to make sure that my membership is being taken care of - they are now - they were not then. Hitler and Mussolini will be handing out snowballs in Hell before I sell out my members to make the Grand Lodge happy". He stopped, looked at me and said" Chuck, there is no way that I can argue with that". We've been good friends ever since. I've been invited twice to sit in on the National Committee meetings to explain how our plan works and how we can improve the National Plan.

I also had some heated discussions with other Executive Board members. At the end of the discussions, we all learned something that we didn't know before, shook hands and actually became better friends.

The National Plan got it's act together, and a lot of you have that now for a variety of reasons. However, the Minnesota Plan remains a superior product, and continues to grow.

Today we have 3 Minnesota members on National Committees. I had a state president who is very well connected and a decades old veteran of the FOP tell me it was because of the pluckiness and political wherewith all that Minnesota showed during that storm.

The Minnesota Legal Defense Plan, Part II

As I mentioned in part I, something had to be done. We had several hundred members in this state that were depending on the Legal Defense Plan, and it was - quite honestly - not doing the job. The question was, how do we come up with something else? Gary Cayo and I had long discussions with our law firm at the time, and were starting to make progress.



Then, in 2003, I was attending a lodge operations seminar in Las Vegas, in conjunction with a Western States Coalition meeting. In that seminar, we received a very large three ring binder that had examples of all types of documents used by state lodges all over the country. What caught my eye was a contract between the Arizona State Lodge and their law firm. In essence, it was a legal defense plan that had all of the elements that we were looking for. I showed the document to Robert Fowler, who was a member of the firm at that time and our lead attorney. I handed him the document and simply asked, "can we do this?". He thumbed through it and had a light bulb go on over his head. He replied "yeah, I think so". A few weeks later, after a few back and forths and some hashing out, Rob presented us with the Minnesota Legal Defense plan. He had everything in it that we had asked, with two big additions - COMPLETE off duty coverage for members, and even criminal defense for spouses. People need to realize that this is totally unheard of. As far as I know, this is the first FOP legal plan to offer such coverage.



When I saw this, my first reaction was "OK, how much extra is this going to cost?". I fell over when he said "nothing". A plan was born.



Gary Cayo and I barnstormed the state to introduce this plan. 300 people signed up quickly. The big bonus was that, while this plan had vastly more coverage than the National Plan, it was cheaper. The State Board was very pleased, and we thought that we had achieved Nirvana. Little did we know that storm clouds were closing in - more in part III.

Just Going Down to the Oyster Shack

Just a quick funny - it looks staged, but I'm assured that it's real.

The Minnesota Legal Defense Plan, Part I

For the first 4 years as my tenure as National Trustee, we all had the National Legal Defense Plan, some of you still do. At the time, the National Plan was the best thing going - it provided (and still does) administrative, criminal and civil coverage. You also have a choice of attorneys, and you can even add your own attorney, provided that he or she joins the plan.

As I jumped into the Trustee shoes, I immediately found that we had some issues. Members would be refused coverage. Attorneys would not be getting paid. Every National Board Meeting that I attended resulted in me having to go to bat and argue with the Legal Defense Plan Board to get a member covered. After a lot of table pounding, I have to say that I was usually successful. Then two things happened that tore it for me. It was at the Board Meeting in Denver in 2002. I argued for coverage, and told that, not only would they not consider my appeal, but that the price of the plan was going up significantly. Needless to say, I was not happy.

About a week later, a member told me about how he needed coverage. He called the service provider for the Legal Defense Plan, who provided him with a list of attorneys. He started going down the list. Attorney after Attorney turned him down, telling him that the FOP didn't pay their bills. Finally, he got to the last attorney (and I'm going to give credit where credit is due ) - Ann Walther. Ann agreed to help out. After hearing this, I knew that our membership was not getting the coverage that they payed for, needed and deserved. A change had to made, and I think that I had an answer.

Expansion

When I was elected National Trustee in 1999, we had 6 lodges and a little more than 400 members in all of Minnesota. I embarked on an expansion program: the principal was simple, and it still works. Identify an area where there is interest. Speak to the people in the area, and find one or more people that are the "spark plugs". If necessary, hold an informational meeting. Once we have 10 people committed, hold a chartering meeting and charter the new lodge.

The first lodge that I chartered was Lodge #7 in Red Wing. As I think about the other lodge charterings, lots of stuff happened - many interesting and sometimes funny things. I remember Neil Brodin flying us up to Moorehead in his plane so that we could charter Lodge #8. We had a great time when we chartered lodge #9 in the Taproom of Fitger's in Duluth. Bruce Anderson and I drove to - and back from - Alexandria in a snowstorm to charter Lodge 10. In more recent years, I recall an informational meeting that we held in Roseau - eventually leading to the chartering of Lodge #22. The photo attached to this posting is one that I sent to Tom Penoza, the National Treasurer who lives in Delaware. He told me that he didn't think that he could live in Minnesota.

Of all of the lodges that we have chartered since 1999 - 7 through 24, The only 2 that I did not actually charter were numbers 18 and 19, due to previous family commitments. I did spend an evening at the informational meeting that did lead to the chartering of 18.

As we stand now, we have 23 lodges and about 2500 active members. While I am loathe to toot my own horn, and I certainly didn't do this alone, I think that my colleagues on the State Board will tell you that a very large amount of this was due to my work. Through it all, I have never lost the vision that what we do is for the improvement of the living conditions of cops and their families. Of all of my accomplishments, I am most proud of the growth of the Minnesota FOP.

Belief

Why did I jump into the FOP with both feet? Well, I saw what the FOP stands for: the betterment of the lives of cops and their families. It offers assistance where needed, defense from all foes foreign and domestic, and improves society overall by making public safety officers more professional and cohesive. If any one of you ever called me at 2:00 AM (and some of you have) and needed help, I would not hesitate. This has been my work ethic since I first became an officer in this organization, and it won't change until I shake this mortal coil.

I wrote a column a few years ago, reflections on my first trip to Police Week in 2000. It was the evening of the last day, and everyone was pretty exhausted. I was helping Danni Rogers take her booth down (Brodin Studios always has a sales booth out there), when I sat on the curb to take a break. My wife sat down with me. On the other side of the curb, there was a guy wearing an FOP t-shirt. We struck up a conversation - he was a cop from Terre Haute, Indiana. We spoke for about 15 minutes, exchanging stories and laughing pretty hard. He said that he and his delegation had to drive home that night, so we stood up, shook hands and wished each other a good life.

As my wife and I headed back to our hotel, she looked at me and said: "you know, you have never seen that guy before, and you'll probably never talk to him again, but you two were carrying on like you were brothers". I just looked at her and said: "we are brothers".

A Break from Politics

When I was a kid, I was fascinated with radio. Since I have yet to grow up, I'm still fascinated. For those old enough to remember AM top 40 radio, there was a huge rivalry between 2 radio stations. I was a fan of KDWB, Channel 63 (yes, the same one that is now on FM, although the music is a little different). A few years back, KARE did a piece on this...here it is.

The Beginning

In 1991, one of my partners, Bud Olson (now Carver County Sheriff) told me that they were chartering a lodge of the FOP in St. Paul Park (yep, this was Lodge 1). I have always had an interest in Fraternal Orders (more on that later) so I was intrigued. Remember, this was long before the wide spread use of the internet, so I had to research the old fashion way...go to the library. There was not a lot at my local branch on the FOP, but I got enough information that I thought that I would like to join...but thought that I would wait until a lodge was founded closer to were I worked or lived. In 1994 (I think) I was told that the FOP had actually formed a state lodge! I called the phone number that I found in the Minneapolis Yellow Pages under "Fraternal Organizations". I spoke to a pleasant sounding guy who identified himself as the State Treasurer. He told me that they had 3 lodges, the closest one to me was lodge 3, that met at Jax in Nordeast Minneapolis. I told him that I would like to join that one. He assured me that he would mail me an application and brochure.....and that's the last I heard. I never received anything.

In 1996 I was at a training session in Brooklyn Park. I ran into an old acquaintance, Steve Pearson, and couldn't help but notice that he was wearing an FOP sweatshirt. He told me that he was now the State President - and this time I DID receive my info in the mail. I joined Lodge #2, which met at the Anoka American Legion. I still have my original membership card.

In February of 1997, all of my talking up of the FOP came to a head when we chartered Lake Minnetonka Lodge #6. I had the honor of being the Charter President. This is a picture of the charter- that's my signature on the second line...John Reed got a pen in his hand faster than I did. We had 34 brothers and sisters sign the charter that night.