Quad County REACT

Saturday, January 16th, 2010
by W8JKC

You may have noticed from my Twitter account (@w8jkc), that I told Quad County REACT that I was not renewing my membership for the 2010 fiscal year.
Why did I choose to not renew, and in effect, resign? Well let me explain.

I started out with REACT upon the recommendation of a member of my local fire department, this person thought that REACT would serve my needs and I could serve them. So I contacted the local team at the time, Multi-County REACT Response Team C-260, and was invited to their meeting. The meeting was held at the Massilon, OH FOP hall. At that first meeting, I filled out an application and was told they would call me after they had ran a background check, and that the membership would have to vote to accept the application at the next meeting. At this first meeting I realized that there were conflicts between select members and the officers of the team. The whole meeting was basically a fact checking session, where both parties kept checking and re-checking Robert’s Rules of Order, the Team By-Laws, and other documents because of a couple of issue that had arisen previously.

After that meeting, the select members mentioned above, approached me as we were all leaving and said they had something in the works, and asked for my contact information. Me being the curious person I am, supplied them with my information. I got a phone call about a week or so later, and in that phone call 1 of those members told me that, the board was running the team for their own agenda, 2/3’s of the members on the team were not happy with any of it, and that they were planning to start their own team and split off from MCRRT, they also invited me to attend their first meeting which was held in the roll call room of the Canton Police Department. This is how Quad County REACT Team #6134 was formed, and how I became one of the founding members. That was back in late 2007 around the month of November.

Now, at first everything was going great, both teams worked on an agreement to basically split the county in half and only run calls in their half of the county. There were however, minor disagreements between the teams over time, but they were eventually worked out.

One of the biggest problems during my tenure with Quad County REACT, was the incident where Ohio REACT Council, and MCRRT C260 sent a letter to the Canton Regional Chamber of Commerce, saying that Quad County was no longer a recognized team under REACT International, Inc. and that we were not insured any longer. (See the letter here.) You can read a full write-up of this incident in my blog’s archives here.

After that, we started taking over all of the events in Stark County and surrounding areas that we covered. Over time it finally came down to where MCRRT only had one event (that I knew of) that made them any money.
Departments started calling us, instead of them, because they heard how much better we were than MCRRT, from their colleagues and other departments/agencies. I can still remember one call, from Jackson Township, which was weird because they previously had always called MCRRT, and not Quad County, and (as far as I knew) didn’t even have our phone number. It turns out that because we worked an event in Jackson Township with the Pro Football Hall of Fame Festival (the balloon liftoff), they had received our phone number and contact information from the HOF committee. This kind of referral to our time is what we wanted to happen with all of the departments, they would hear about us by word of mouth from other departments or agencies. You may not realize it now, but people talk about stuff like this. A word of advice, if you do something wrong or bad, people will talk about that one bad thing more than all of the good stuff you do.

During the end of 2007 we focused on getting our team started and working with the community.
In 2008, we worked on getting more agencies and departments to call us for emergencies, and for people to call us for events. (We did a very good job at this, I might add.)
2009 was sort of a rough year for us, with the trip to Maryland (see blog post here), and other important issues.

In late 2007 I approached the Board of Directors and offered to setup and maintain a website for the team, I explained that it would make us more professional, get the word out about our team and what we do, and because I already setup my own web server that the cost would be low to them. While skeptical at first, they agreed and I went about purchasing the domain name of quadcountyreact.org on December 26 2007.
It only took me about a week to get the original site up and running and add all of our information to it.
I worked behind the scenes on my own personal time, to optimize the site for search engines, spread the URL to other REACT teams around the U.S. (I think I got a link to quadcountyreact.org from about 20 other REACT team websites in total to date), I submitted most of our events to calendarofohio.com which is owned by The Canton Repository (the local newspaper), basically I took the initiative to spread the word about our site on my own, in the best interests of the team.

I custom wrote and coded several projects which were integrated into the site, The weather alerts on the left hand side, automatically checked the NOAA server for the latest data every time the page was loaded. I added a Computer Aided Dispatch System (Tickets CAD from OpenISES), and custom integrated it into our member roster page for ease of updating the roster. I added the team emergency phone number (330) 57-REACT, (Google Voice) and set it up to forward to the top 3 board members phones at the same time. I also set up email addresses for all of our members, however they were rarely used by anyone except me. I also added a custom email list, which replaced our conventional paging system through USA Mobility. We had to cancel our contract with USA Mobility because of lack of funds. Team members were unwilling to pay for a pager. My email list replacement was setup for free, because it used text messaging capability’s on the members’ cell phones. I even added a custom script that would automatically forward any text message that was sent to (330) 57-REACT to the email list.

I worked countless hours over the course of the last 2 years to make subtle changes to the site, either to make the site better, or add more information.

The only complaint about the site I received was that the Board couldn’t update the site on their own. Every update had to go through me.
The were reasons I set it up like this. First, the site was completely coded in PHP from scratch and even the smallest typo or change could have major effects, even going as far as bring the whole site down until I fixed it. Secondly, the server the site was hosted on is on my home network, behind a firewall, and the only open port was 80 which served the web pages. There was no way for anyone outside my local network at home could hack in and change anything. I couldn’t even get in from outside the local network. This allowed me to insure that not only the site was secure, but also the other sites I host, and my network were secure.

All of the hosting, design, maintenance, services, etc that were part of the site, were completely FREE for the team’s use. The only thing the team ever paid for was $15 to register the domain name. That’s it. Every thing else was either at cost to me, or a free service. You tell me anywhere else commercially that you can get hosting and domain name registration for a whole year for that price, not to mention all the design and services. No where.

I had a verbal agreement with the board, that as long as I was a member of the team, I would continue to host, update, maintain, etc in regards to the website, and if I ever decided to resign or leave, that we could work something out for them to transfer to another server or a paid company’s services.

The reason I decided and chose not to renew my membership for the 2010 fiscal year, is because the current Board of Directors for the team (not all of them, just a few certain people) are in my opinion running the team straight into the ground. They only support their own agenda, and any ideas I had to benefit the team were quickly shot down. I took it upon myself to help this team, and I can name a few times where a Board member would try something, I would check our governing bylaws, and remind them about a certain section to make sure they were operating the team within the bylaws.

I took it upon myself for at least 6 meetings I can remember to take down minutes because the appointed team secretary didn’t show up.

I even took it upon myself to completely rewrite the team’s bylaws, adding line numbers, fixing typos, while still keeping all the wording in the original in them. Once again, my work was quickly shot down.

So I feel that this team is heading in the wrong direction, that the current Board of Directors of Quad County REACT will lead the team to disbanding, and that I wasn’t being taken seriously for anything I tried to do.

The last meeting I attended in which I told them I was not renewing, I also informed them that I no longer wished to host, update, or maintain the website. I also decided that all content designed, or written by myself would remain in my possession as these things took numerous hours to work on.

Legal Notice: This blog post is posted in accordance with REACT International, Inc. Policy Statement 6-01, “Public Announcements” which can be found at http://www.reactintl.org/pubs/RI_policy_10-10-04.pdf and is protected by the First Amendment of the United Sates Constitution, Bill of Rights, Freedom of Speech/Expression. Correspondence relating to this blog post may be addressed to justin@w8jkc.com