BSA Western Region Reorganization
Posted in Scouting News by John E. Pannell on August 27th, 2008 at 5:02 am 
BSA Western Region Logo
The BSA’s Western Region has been reorganized. As a result, the OA sections within that region have changed. Roy More wrote about this on his blog almost two weeks ago but I did not see it until tonight.
Here’s the official announcement from the Western Region of the Order of the Arrow: Western Region Realignment Announced.
Note carefully how the sections are labeled. These labels do not follow current naming conventions and practice within the OA. The announcement clearly notes “…that the section designations used above are temporary and will be replaced with permanent designations in the near future.”
According to this announcement, as a result of the changes, two sections currently have no section chief. A procedure is in place to deal with any vacancies in elected positions.
A map of the new sections, as well as a list of their component lodges, is on the Western Region website. I have not attempted to figure out what has been changed. I’ll leave that to others. Given the geographical challenges within this region, to me here in the Southeast the new sections generally appear logical, without any of the perceived “oddities” created by the other regions’ reorganizations.
The end of the announcement sounds just a little too politically correct for my tastes, “…These changes are exciting and are going to take the efforts of all of us to ensure that the transition goes smoothly.”
I agree that Western Region brothers must work together to make this transition go smoothly. For those who might not be pleased at the change, I remind them this is a fait accompli and not open for discussion. It is an opportunity. I just find it a bit difficult to describe an administrative change as “exciting”. I’ve never been good at either marketing or politics 
Popularity: 10% [?]
Being in the Western Region I find the alignment a little wacky in the southern part of the region, namely AZ, NM, NV, El Paso and San Diego. I will have the an opportunity to see the Western Region OA leadership at the W1A conclave and will find out more.
I see that now… I thought that oddity in SoCal and AZ was Pang lodge, not Tiwahe.
It does seem odd to send San Diego over to AZ but to send Tuscon east to NM.
Perhaps this was a compromise of sorts to keep the C2, E2 and E3 sections about evenly divided? But moving Tiwahe to C2 and Tuscon, AZ to E2 would also result in evenly divided sections.
The best reason for this is probably a BSA management need/decision/desire at the Area level. I’m *certainly* not privy to that!
On that map, the letters are the BSA areas, which are assigned for the BSA’s management reasons, while the numbers are the sections, which are the OA’s subdivisions of those areas.
So the San Diego/Tucson swap John describes would leave Area E with the off-shore councils and the AZ/NM councils but without any connecting area on the coast.
Given the military connections to the Far East Council (and that Hawaii is to the south) it makes sense to tie those in to San Diego and then run the area along the Mexican border.
The areas pretty much make sense:
A: Colorado/Wyoming
B: Utah/Idaho/Montana
C: LA and south-central California
D: Oregon/Washington
E: Offshore/Arizona/New Mexico/San Diego/Las Vegas
F: San Francisco, northern Cal, and Nevada
One brief note, the Region hasn’t settled on the names of the section-areas. The lettered areas were used in their region’s planning for the council realignment, but these are not the final designators.
I am assuming that they will use W-1A, etc., just like in the last version of the FOG that I’ve seen.
Check back at http://www.oasections.com/WR2008R.html
[...] I had written about a reorganization of the area boundaries in the BSA’s Western Region and the changes that would be made to the [...]