Regardless of his intentions and vision, however, the UMCA lies at the mercy of its leaders—in this case, Hughes and the board. Record keeping and record sharing have, at best, been afterthoughts for the past number of years. Complaints have surfaced regarding the lack of regularly issued board meeting minutes and financial reports. For an organization that controls the minutia of sanctioning, rules, and race promotion, it’s neither a small task nor a small issue when the accounting comes up missing.

Hughes’ tone gets serious, and his stress is audible as he sighs. “Well, I’m working on [getting the paperwork in order] right now,” he says. “The treasurer and finance company have received the ‘03, ‘04, and ‘05 financials. I’m going to publish those in the next issue of the magazine.”

Annual reports for 2005 were likely the most challenging for Hughes to assemble. In December, 2004, his enjoyment of a routine winter training ride came to a screeching halt when he went down over a set of icy railroad tracks, shattering his pelvis. According to Hughes, “I did my best to get stuff out the door in ‘05. Basically, I had an entire year of recuperating.”

As a 6-time RAAM champion and transcontinental record holder, Seana Hogan knows a thing or two about pain and suffering, and public comments she has made don’t show a lot of sympathy for Hughes and the UMCA aristocracy. “Where are the financial reports?” she asked in February in the group’s online forum. “Per the bylaws, there is suppose to be a financial report available to the members annually; we have not seen one since 2004. It is the responsibility of the Board to ensure the integrity of the UMCA's non-profit IRS status by insisting on adherence to the bylaws.”

Her comments strike at the heart of the controversy surrounding the UMCA: The organization’s continuing lack of transparency. “Hughes has kept up a façade, and in my opinion, the UMCA is going through a questionable tax situation in relation to its not-for-profit status,” says Skilbeck.

The transparency extends to the most sacred tenet of any democratic organization, open and fair elections. It’s another recent stumbling block for the UMCA, whose bylaws mandate a call for nominations in the September/October issue of the group’s bi-monthly publication. When the issue hit members’ mailboxes, the nomination process was conspicuously absent. Hughes explains.

“They didn’t get into that issue,” he says, “But they were in the next one. It just didn’t happen. I’m encouraged by the number of nominations we have now.” Although the omission is inexcusable to Skilbeck and others, Hughes brushes aside the issue quite casually. “If we miss one magazine issue, I don’t think that it’s the end of the world. People are upset about it, but nobody has proposed why it might be to my advantage to delay the process. It was a busy fall. Sometimes, things fall through the cracks.”

To add insult to the organization’s injuries, another bylaw area has been regularly overlooked. Although the group’s Board of Directors is mandated to meet four times a year, those regular meetings have rarely occurred. In-person conferences have been replaced by email exchanges; a situation that Hughes feels is overdue. “The board has met annually by conference call,” he says. “The constitution hasn’t been amended since 2002 to reflect modern technology. We’ve learned that most of the discussion can be better done by email. Rather than trying to have all the conversation in 2 hours, we might have 2 weeks to consider an important issue. In a perfect world, if we had a huge budget, we could get together 4 times a year. So now, it becomes a matter of using the budget wisely. Rather than mandating a fixed set of meetings in the bylaws, we need to identify a better way of using our time.”

Not everyone agrees. Skilbeck says, "It doesn't work to replace board meetings with emails. The key here is that John Hughes doesn't tolerate the dissenting opinion, as a few board members have experienced. In many cases, those that have disagreed with Hughes have been cut out of the discussion—including me,” he says. “While board meetings can be cruel and unfair, this particular kind of exclusion cannot happen.”

Alternatives to the financial and time stresses of in-person board meetings do exist, including the use of secure online chat rooms, a move that the board has yet to approve. Until then, the closed-door nature of private email discussions puts the brakes on the UMCA’s attempts to move toward a transparent nature that will please its members.