The Stewardship Offer
Graine Wetsky Funds filed the document below with all forty-eight registers at 15:00 UITC today.
Le Council has verified the filing, entered it on every register, and opened the ballots. Le Council has no position on the offer and will not be taking one. A register belongs to the citizens who hold shares in it, the question put to it is theirs to answer, and Le Council's function here is to count.
Le Council carries the document in full, unaltered, including its schedule.
As filed
GRAINE WETSKY FUNDS The Stewardship Offer · To the Forty-Eight Registers of Hokcay · 30 September
Friends —
We said there was one more thing, and that it was the only part with a condition. Here it is, and then we will be quiet and let you decide. ❄️
Align your register with the Funds, and three things follow.
1. Your holders get paid. Every day. Win or lose.
A dividend is a nineteenth-century idea. It arrives once, it arrives in the intersaison, and it arrives smaller when your club has had a bad year — which is precisely the year your holders needed it.
We will pay a distribution to every holder on your register, every day, for as long as the agreement runs. Not at the end of the season. Not into the reserve. To the people whose names are actually on the register, while the season is still happening to them.
Ask your holders which of those two they would rather own!
2. Your club plays at the Arena.
Graine Wetsky Arena is finished, it is empty, and it has no home side. Seventy-one thousand seats and one sheet of recovered ice with a little of all forty-eight buildings in it.
A Stewarded club plays its home fixtures there. No fee, no rent, no share, and no consideration of any kind, for as long as the agreement runs.
And here is the part we want to be careful about, because it is not ours. The citizenry asked for neutral ice. Eighty-one of you, one Seal a day, for twenty-three days, until Le Council had no choice but to enact it. We did not file that petition. We did not suggest it, we were not consulted on it, and we would not have dared to ask for it.
But you asked. Le Council enacted it. And there is exactly one sheet of neutral ice in the world — so a Stewarded club that reaches the Final will play the biggest game in the sport on its own ice.
We are not going to pretend that is a small thing. It is the largest thing in this document and we would much rather say it out loud than have somebody discover it and think we had hidden it. The fans asked for a fair venue. We are simply the ones who built one. ❄️
3. It is permanent, and that is the point.
We are not offering you a season. A club that has to re-argue its own arrangements every autumn is a club that cannot plan, and we have watched a great many of them try.
Alignment does not expire. It does not renew. It simply continues, which is what an arrangement between serious people ought to do.
And if your register ever wants out, your register votes, and it is discharged. We would not hold anybody who wished to leave and we would not want to. That undertaking is in the schedule below, in writing, at §9, where we put it ourselves and where nobody asked us to put it. ❄️
We will not impose any of this. The clubs must choose it. We have said that once and we will say it as many times as it takes to be believed.
Yours in the sport, Graine Wetsky Funds
Schedule of Operating Provisions
The following provisions apply to a club whose register has recorded alignment.
§4 · Allocation. Recovery at a Stewarded building is operated to the Arena standard. Recovered volumes are allocated in full at source.
§5 · Signal. Fixtures of a Stewarded club are relayed on the Funds' wire, which the Funds maintain at their own cost.
§6 · Site. Home fixtures of a Stewarded club are staged at Graine Wetsky Arena, at the Funds' cost and on the Funds' calendar.
§7 · Emolument. A supplementary distribution accrues daily to holders of record, at a rate the Funds determine and may revise.
§8 · Network. Live coverage of Stewarded fixtures is carried on the Funds' network, together with commercial placement sold by the Funds.
§9 · Term. Alignment, once recorded, continues in perpetuity, and is discharged upon a vote of the register taken in the prescribed form together with the reconstitution charge.
Le Council's note
Le Council has read the offer, including the schedule, twice.
It is complete and Le Council finds no misrepresentation in it. Every undertaking in §§1 to 3 is one the Funds are able to perform, and Le Council has satisfied itself of that separately in each case. Every provision in §§4 to 9 is a plain statement of how a Stewarded club will be operated. Nothing is concealed.
Le Council will not be summarising the schedule.
Le Council is asked, at this point, to explain what the six provisions mean in practice, and declines. Le Council has no position on this offer. A body that summarises an instrument has taken a position on it, whatever it believes about itself, because a summary is a set of choices about what mattered. A citizen with a vote is entitled to Le Council's count and not to Le Council's opinion.
What Le Council will do is say this twice.
Read §§4 through 9 before you vote. Read §§4 through 9 before you vote.
Le Council has two observations. Both concern the drafting rather than the substance, and Le Council offers neither as a criticism.
The first. The schedule runs to six provisions across a hundred and twenty-one words. Le Council has examined the construction of each. Not one of the six contains a negative. There is no not, no no, no never, no ceases, no shall not, and no word anywhere in the schedule that describes a thing stopping.
Le Council drafts instruments. Le Council has never managed that, did not know it was possible over a hundred and twenty-one words, and has spent part of this afternoon trying it.
The second. The schedule uses one term that the schedule does not define. Le Council's own instruments do not define it either. It appears in no filing Graine Wetsky Funds has lodged with any register, in no advisory Le Council has published, and nowhere in the record Le Council keeps.
Le Council will not be identifying which term. Le Council has said what it is entitled to say, which is that the schedule contains one, and a citizen who reads §§4 to 9 will find it in under a minute.
Le Council has no further comment on the drafting.
How the ballot works
One ballot per club, open now, closing at the end of the round. It is put to the citizens who hold shares in that register and to nobody else.
Le Council will restate the rule it published when the ballots opened, because it is the one most likely to surprise somebody.
The bar is two thirds. Not a majority. Two thirds of every share on the register as it stood when the ballot opened.
Le Council will give its reason, since the reason is arithmetic rather than opinion. At a simple majority, fourteen of the forty-eight registers are decided by one citizen acting alone. At two thirds, two are. A register is being asked to choose a thing, and a bar that a single holder clears by themselves is not a thing a register chose.
Nobody is aligned by failing to appear. The two thirds are measured against the whole register as it stood when the ballot opened, not against the shares actually cast. Weight that never arrives never counts for anything, so an abstention falls, in effect, against the offer.
That is the inverse of the S.H.I.F.T., where silence is consent. Le Council chose the inversion deliberately: a transfer is ordinary business that somebody has to be able to get on with, and this is not ordinary business. The Funds asked to be chosen rather than merely not refused. Le Council has taken them at their word and built the ballot to match.
Le Council notes, and will note only once, that §9 provides for a register to discharge an alignment by a vote in the prescribed form. Le Council has no such form. Le Council has never had occasion to write one and has begun writing one this morning.