LEAGUE members that are slow players - how do you deal with it?

Situation is this:

- I play in an after-work weekday league of 9-hole rounds for 26 weeks during the summer months here in NEOH.

- A couple guys out of 16 are incredibly slow.

- ONE of those guys incessantly insists on playing in the lead group.

- Said guy is a slow player, and often struggles...making him even slower.

- Assigned groupings won't work because several members struggle to get there on time after work - so we always have to leave a slot or two open in the last group, which.....

- leads to awkward groupings of having foursomes at the front of the league and usually twosomes and threesomes at the tail end of the league.

- The front/lead group of four has regularly been clocking in at 2.5 hours per nine lately.

- There is another league behind us (we're the 'early league - with tee times from 4-4:30 and they have 4:30-5:15).

- The course has reprimanded us several times over the past 3-5 years for overall slow play - their pace of play expectation is 2:06 for nine holes.

In a nutshell, the best solution we can come up with is a 'double-bogey (DB) mandatory pick up' rule.  Let the player play through his DB stroke, and then prohibit any/all shots on that hole.  Our ESC basically has everyone on a level playing field - for the most part.  So HCPs are all mostly truncated at DB.  Our contract with the course says we get one warning, and then are required to pick up at SINGLE bogey if slow play is incurred on any particular round throughout the season.  Maybe a third of our players struggle to average bogey golf - so that's a bit beyond their avg expectations.

FWIW - the league director and a few others of us that are getting fed up with the slow play rep of our league prefer the proactive approach of mandating a pick up at DB for all league players.  But we're really open for any other suggestions that may help improve the pace of play...without causing WWIII within the group.

Any and all suggestions are MUCH appreciated.  Thanks!