July board meeting of CBA.
 
Pres. Stephani called the meeting to order at 5:10 PM. Present were Stephani, Manne, Levinson, Wisner, Orr, Moese, Purcell and Wilson. Not present was Mirus.
 
After discussion we agreed to make a one-word change of “problems” to “Issues” to the May minutes pursuant to comments from Agnes Delaney.
 
The June minutes were approved as distributed.
 
There was a short discussion of the topic of sanction holder succession with no resolution but a general agreement that we need to recruit some additional directors.
 
We did our usual review of the 3 priorities:
Zero-tolerance: no activity.
New location: bypass until later in the meeting.
Membership: bypass until later in the meeting.
 
Presidents report:
The primary topic was the succession of Debbie Cummings as supply chairman and Mike Lipp and CBC coordinator and how we might split their duties.
·       Potter Orr agreed to take over the technology issues that Mike Lipp has been dealing with.
·       Since Potter Orr and AJ Stephani will be directing the Tuesday night CBA games, one or the other of them will take on the task of making monthly reports to ACBL.
·       Mike Lipp is going to continue the job of getting sanction reports for unit games.
·       Unresolved was who would do the unit wide game.
·       Lorna Davis and Debbie Wiest have taken over the supplies job. They are resolving the membership issues for Costco and Sam’s Club. They asked for a communiqué from the board to the directors supporting them in an effort to clean out extraneous materials. Manne and Orr will handle that.
 
Treas.’s report:  There are no dramatic surprises involved - a copy is attached. Treas. Wisner requested and received permission from the board to make a minor change in the accounting methods. Until now rent income from sanction holders has always been reported one month later than the actual games, for example, June revenue was for the games held in May. The treasurer would like to change this so that we report income in the month it was earned. This will make the table count information match up better with the income. The result will be that the year 2013 will actually show 13 months worth of income (including December 2012). As an offset to this, she will write off all depreciable fixed assets still on the books during 2013. The net effect on the year should be negligible.  Statistics on table counts by game for the 1st half of 2013 are also attached.
 
Membership:
·       Joanne Earls and Chris Hastie have brought a tremendous amount of energy to this task and are doing a great job. We reiterate our thanks to them.
·       In the future, they will also take over the job of ordering name tags for new members of the unit and the ACBL in and out file will be forwarded to them each month.
·       Sonya Wilson described her efforts and congratulating new life master’s and requested support of the board in providing a free play along with congratulatory card to each new life master. This was approved and Sonya will continue to do this job.
Education committee:
·       Mike Purcell reported on the change in format for the Saturday beginners game. It has changed from a monitored novice duplicate game running at the same time as the afternoon open game to a morning time slot of supervised play. This change affects the makeup of the players and we now have many more true beginners and fewer people who are actually playing duplicate bridge (since no master points are available in this new format). While some of the novice duplicate players who were playing on Saturday afternoon are not pleased, this does allow us to get really new players into the bridge center. In addition, it makes the staffing of this game much easier since those who will come to monitor this game will also be able to play in the Saturday afternoon game.
 
Tournament committee:  The summer Stac is next week and it will have the same schedule as it has had for the last several years including an extra afternoon game on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday Swiss. The format for all of those days will be a morning game starting at 10 AM in the afternoon game at 2:30 PM.
 
Tuesday evening game committee: Pres. Stephani reported on a petition effort by players in the NLM game on Tuesday evening asking that we not change the start time from 7 PM to 6:30 PM. We have agreed with that request and the Tuesday evening start time will remain unchanged at 7 PM.
 
CBC location: The board discussed some potential sites submitted to us either by a realtor or by online perusal. Nothing that seems to meet our requirements has appeared so far. There was additional discussion as to how we might decide what regions within the area constitute a viable site for a bridge center. We will attempt some additional study of where members of the unit live and also where the people who play regularly live.  In addition, we discussed investigating credit possibilities if a new location for purchase became available.  As a point of reference, the existing lease runs through February 2017.  Ron Manne suggested we investigate pre-approval for a mortgage.  Sonya Wilson volunteered to get a banker to contact treasurer Susan Wisner on this point.
 
We discussed a date for the August meeting and decided that between board members being out of town and in ACBL National happening during the month of August that we would either attempt to reschedule it for Tuesday, August 20 or business permitting, skip it completely.
 
Pres. Stephani adjourned the meeting with moments to spare before the start of the Tuesday evening game.