CBA board meeting October 8, 2013
The meeting was called to order on time at 5 PM. Present
were: Stephani, Moese, Orr, Manne, Wisner, Purcell and Levinson. Absent was
Wilson.
The minutes of the September meeting were approved as
previously distributed.
The 3 priorities:
Building: AJ Stephani, Bob Brown and Susan Wisner
looked at a building on Blue Ash road. The building is a warehouse style construction
of 10,000 ft.². At present about 6500
ft.² is finished for offices and the rest is still a warehouse. It has slightly
fewer parking spaces than our current building, however there is space
immediately adjacent to the building that could be paved to increase the number
of spaces. The current tenants lease expires at the end of this year and our
realtor will contact the building owner. We have no firm idea of what the
economics of the deal might be.
Membership: We need to find a volunteer who would
be willing to maintain our email mass distribution list. This is a separate
program from our membership list and needs a certain amount of ongoing
maintenance. This can be accomplished by remote control. We will solicit
volunteers for this position.
Zero-tolerance (play friendly) has had no current
issues.
Presidents report.
Roof Leak Pres. Stephani contacted the building owner about our
roof leak. He was very concerned since the building received a very expensive
roof replacement just prior to his purchase of the site. He contacted the
roofing company and they inspected the roof. The basic proof was proclaimed to
be in good condition but that there was a possibility of small leaks during
large rains at the points where pipes pierce the roof for our HVAC units. They
will add additional sealant in those locations.
Party planning for numerous events is underway.
Sunday, November 30 will be a cake and bridge event to
honor John Altman’s selection as King of bridge.
Sunday, November 24 will be a lunch and bridge
celebration for Matthew and Pam Granovetter’s elevation to grand life master.
As part of that celebration, we will invite all of the grand life master’s from
our district to attend. There are 8.
Monday, December 9 will be the annual board
organizational meeting at a location to be determined.
Wednesday, December 11 will be the CBC holiday party.
Election update: Joe Muenks has agreed to handle
the election process as he did last year, however, he expressed concern about
certain directors influencing early voting held at their games. After
discussion, the board has agreed to act as or find election monitors facilitators
to be available prior to each game at CBC.
Midwest Monitor
At the last meeting the CBA board passed a motion to ask that district
11 discontinue paper printing and mailing of the Midwest Monitor. We never had
a chance to make that motion at the meeting since Brad Bartol (editor and
publisher of the Midwest Monitor) produced his own motion to change the
production method of the magazine. That motion was passed by the district board
and sent back to each individual unit for ratification. Knowing that we would
be discussing this issue, Adrienne Netherwood asked to attend the meeting and
be part of the discussion. Adrienne is a former board member of CBA and is also
the district treasurer. The proposal we have been asked to ratify involves
stopping the printing and mailing of the Midwest monitor and instead producing
it as an interactive PDF file to be posted on some website for electronic
access. While the proposed fees for producing the Midwest monitor in this form
are substantially lower than what we were paying for the paper mailed version,
it is still a substantial amount of money. According to the proposal, CBA’s
cost for the Midwest monitor would decline from an average of $4500 per year to
$1500 per year. There was still substantial doubt among members of the board as
to whether even that amount was justified and questions as to whether the
Midwest Monitor was a viable publication at all. The board voted not to ratify
the motion passed by the district. The vote not to ratify was 6 in favor, none
opposed and one abstention (AJ Stephani). That decision will be passed along to
other units within the district prior to the next district board meeting which
will be at the Louisville regional in early November. Adrienne agreed to lobby
other units to take the same approach. There was some discussion of
alternatives to the newsletter but we agreed to hold those until we see the
next decision from the district board.
AED Board
member Orr had sent an earlier email requesting that we revisit the decision
not to purchase an AED (Automatic External Defibrillator) for CBC. The same concerns over operator
training, legal liability and the difficulty of managing the use of the device
remained from the last meeting. Pres. Stephani asked board member Orr to
research this issue with ACBL and see if we could gather any information about
other similar bridge clubs and their use of AED’s.
Treas. Susan Wisner presented the quarterly financial
statements to the board (which had been emailed earlier). She also reported
that $541 had been received in honor of Dotty slaughter. The financials were
discussed with no outstanding issues or questions. This year’s results are an
improvement over last year despite the fact that bridge center table counts are
down slightly.
The education committee was terribly pleased not have a
report.
The tournament committee reported that we are prepared
for the NAP on October 19 and 20th and for the OctoberBest sectional
the following weekend. Mary Clifton had responded to a request to allow Northern
Kentucky use any money left over from the Middletown sectional fund to support
the Northern Kentucky sectional to be held next August. Mary said that after
paying the bills for the canceled sectional this year that they would be very
little money ($220) left in that fund. Pres. Stephani made a motion that was
seconded and passed that the CBA board consider carefully any requests made by Northern
Kentucky for financial assistance in getting this sectional tournament started.
The meeting was then adjourned in time for board members
Moese and Purcell to deliver the pregame lecture.