WI:Proposed changes offer a soul-searching moment for co-ops

A packed legislative hearing in Madison last week was a good reminder of what is beautiful about cooperatives. It also revealed a lot about what is broken. The topic of that hearing was Assembly Bill 353, a bill that would allow co-ops to make some fairly un-democratic changes to their bylaws – provided that co-op members vote democratically to do so. If the bill (and its Senate companion SB 281) passes, co-ops will be able to change their bylaws to give non-members voting rights on the board and limit members’ access to financial and other records of the co-op.In addition, one co-op in the state – Cooperative Resources International, with subsidiaries Genex and Agsource – would be allowed to award voting rights based on patronage rather than one member, one vote.   Cooperative Network, Foremost Farms, and of course CRI lined up to testify in favor of these new freedoms, emphasizing that the bill simply seeks to give co-ops more "flexibility."  Taking a different perspective were nearly a dozen farmers, representing operations of all different sizes and types, who thought that having non-members voting on their cooperative boards sounded like a terrible idea. They similarly panned the portion of the bill that would allow CRI to distance itself from the one member, one vote principle.