The meeting was scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. at Airways Middle School, with the delegates and alternates elected earlier this month required to register between 12 noon and 1 p.m.
One of two chairmanship candidates, Jay Bailey and Van Turner, will be elected by a newly configured party executive committee, which must be elected first. But the selection of committee members, always a contentious issue among Democrats, will be doubly so on Saturday.
Partisans of Bailey are insisting that the delegates and alternates must expand the committee according to a formula which they maintain has now been mandated by the state Democratic executive committee.
Turner’s supporters dispute this, citing the rejection of that formula at a meeting of the local party’s existing executive committee earlier this month.
