At the risk of reopening some old wounds, I feel obliged to toss in my two cents here.
A year or so ago we had a rather spirited discussion regarding the life span of courses that had been "adjusted"- that is, for which only a portion of the measurement was new. The policy that was adopted was that the life of the course certification was only as long as the life of its oldest measured segment, and the determination of the age of a measurement was by the date that the application was first submitted for approval.
So to address the issue Keith raises, I know a way to have the life span of a course certification be 30 years. Instead of measuring the course twice, measure it six times. Submit two of the measurements for certification every 10 years. If the measurement has never been part of a submitted application, the clock does not start ticking on it. For a 5K, that requires about another hour and a half on the course.
To those who argue in favor of a validation style single measurement I ask "does that mean that each measurement in a previously submitted application now count as half a measurement?" If a certification requires two measurements, then it should require two measurements.
I argued a year ago and will argue now that our procedures need to be clear, consistent, and friendly to the running community. And I go back to the proposal that Pete Riegel submitted and I agreed with then, which is that the original measurer ought to be able to re-submit the data from an expiring measurement. We probably want to put some parameters on this, and give the certifier some leeway. But we can make clear to the running community what they have to do, and we can be consistent in our enforcement.
My understanding is that the main reasons for discontinuing renewals included that the course list was getting too long, and that the people submitting the renewals were not in a position to know if the course had changed or not. As the number of renewals were quite small (5%?) this won't come up often, but it will address those cases where a course has truly remained unchanged for ten years or more. We could treat adjustment essentially the same way.
I think it's important that the people we support think what we do makes sense, and I'm not sure either the current renewal policy or the current adjustment policy does. We want race directors to seek us out- not to look for ways around engaging us, and we especially don't want to look like our rules generate more measurement work and/or fees.
we need something robust and consistent. Let's work on getting there.