Plans to dissolve the board of the James Beard Foundation immediately and replace some members with food professionals have stalled, the New York Times reports.

According to Charlie Trotter, head of a committee of chefs and other food industry leaders helping to reorganize the nonprofit, New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said the plan to transform the board posed a potential conflict of interest because the new trustees would be overseeing annual awards for which they would be eligible. Spitzer spokesman Paul Larrabee said that although the office does not evaluate prospective board members, it does "give guidelines for the kinds of skills and experience that a nonprofit might find useful."

Former board president Leonard F. Pickell, Jr. was indicted last month on charges of grand larceny and forgery, and the entire board had been scheduled to resign on January 5. George M. Sape, the foundation's current board chair, said all but two of the board's eleven members had submitted letters of resignation. But the foundation's bylaws dictate that a new board, with at least three members, must be appointed before the resignations can go into effect. Those new members were to be culled from the reorganization committee, whose members include chefs Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, and Jacques P�pin; restaurateurs Danny Meyer and Rich Melman; Dorothy Cann Hamilton, founder and CEO of the French Culinary Institute; journalists Colman Andrews and Corby Kummer; and Bill Shore, founder of the nonprofit Share our Strength.

The foundation has tried to insulate the James Beard Awards, which are to be presented May 2, from the scandal. However, Kummer is leading a campaign by hundreds of awards judges, mostly journalists, to either disassociate the awards from the foundation altogether or establish an entirely separate board to run the awards competition. "At least for this year, in light of everything that's happened, the awards need independent governance," he told the Times. "Who knows who'll be in charge of the Beard Foundation next year?"