Posts Tagged → federation of sportsmen
Is Lowell Graybill purposefully destroying PFSC?
The Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen and Conservationists (formerly Clubs) is a group with which I have had a relationship since 1998. It is a group, for which it stands, to which I have great allegiance. It represents a great deal of what I believe in, and care about. And its members are by and large salt-of-the-earth best people you will ever meet.
For many years I eschewed involvement in PFSC’s politics. It seemed like a lot of ego and petty personality stuff drove most of it. Very few policy issues were that hard fought amongst the membership.
But in the past four years, the group has really fallen on hard times, financially and politically. Time was, most PA elected officials didn’t say or do anything about outdoor sports (hunting, fishing, trapping) without consulting PFSC for guidance. Those days are long gone, with most elected officials today saying “P…F…See…whattt?”
They really have no idea who or what PFSC is, what it stands for, what it used to achieve. And yes, PFSC used to achieve a lot. As a 501(c)(4), PFSC was able to hit hard politically. People who comfortably held their elected seats could lose them almost overnight, having said or done something that egregiously damaged Pennsylvania’s hunting or fishing, or its natural resources and wildlife habitat. Those days are long gone. PFSC still claims to represent sportsmen and sportswomen, but its stature as that representative is sorely depreciated.
Fast forward to today, and this spring PFSC held an election that can only be described as North Korean. It was a complete sham in every way. Today the Pennsylvania Outdoor News carried an opinion piece I wrote about that sham s/election.
Instead of getting new people running the organization, which had been run by the same people over and over and over for years upon years, PFSC held a star chamber “nominating committee” that gave 30 voters total the choice of one person to vote for. No real choice was offered, and no real votes were had. It was all inside game stuff, rigged and pre-wired.
Out of this sham s/election process a guy named Lowell Graybill once again became PFSC president. This is a role that Graybill has held at least once before, having held the immediate past treasurer position. As PFSC treasurer, Graybill was all but president of PFSC, often acting as president for the doddering guy who held it officially. Just two years ago, Graybill teamed up with the RK Mellon Foundation to run a kind of explode-your-organization-from-inside process.
Officially this was called a steering committee, but to many people involved it looked like the RKMF-funded consultant was trying to steer PFSC right over a cliff, or into a brick wall. The steering committee’s purpose was clearly destructive, and Graybill did all he could to strip PFSC of its 501(c)(4) status, to remove the Second Amendment from PFSC’s mission statement, and to have the organization adopt one radical environmentalist policy position after another. Any and all of these would have deeply offended self-respecting sportsmen, and further driven PFSC from the mainstream to the political fringe.
All of this was stopped because enough of us fended off one attack or another in 2018 and 2019. But now that Graybill is PFSC president again, we can expect it all to start again. And it is doubtful there are strong enough people on the board or especially the executive board to stop him.
During all the many years that Lowell Graybill has served on PFSC’s executive board in one capacity or another, at least twice as president, the organization has gone from about 1,500 clubs to about 150 clubs today. It is a precipitous drop that has resulted in the PFSC having little clout on Capitol Hill and little recognition among sportsmen.
The latest PFSC “election” won once again by Graybill was a demonstration of extreme strong-arm win-lose politics, whose machinations are beginning to become public discussion among discouraged sportsmen. If PFSC’s internal politics do not change after the PA Outdoor News expose, then the organization will continue to lose support and members, until it becomes what it almost is already, a shell organization funded by wealthy individuals and foundations whose actual objectives are out of synch with 95% of sportsmen.
The wise way to handle the different PFSC factions was to give a representative/ person with a different voice a seat on the executive committee. But the new executive director Harold Daub, and Lowell Graybill, are playing power politics. It is all or nothing, win or lose, and win at all cost. The cost of this win-lose (as opposed to win-win) approach is what we see today: Hurt, frustrated, upset people, who played by the rules, donated their time and money for the cause, who were dedicated and built up expertise and gravitas, who were then excluded from the process, cast aside, because someone just had to have all the marbles, couldn’t share the marbles. Lowell Graybill’s approach makes for unsteady, unhealthy organizations.
No one presently involved with PFSC’s board has had a longer association or held more positions than Lowell Graybill. Statistically speaking, Graybill’s correlation with PFSC’s demise is very strong. When we add up all of the evidence surrounding Lowell Graybill’s long association with PFSC, we have to ask: Is he purposefully destroying PFSC?
And why not ask this? The Left specializes in taking over organizations from the inside, or destroying them and then reconstituting them as centers of Leftist activism.
PFSC has suffered from bad leadership for a long time. But now we ask, has it been purposefully bad?