CBA board meeting May 14, 2013
 
Agenda
·       Minutes of previous meeting.
·       3 priorities.
·       Presidents report.
·       Treas.’s report.
·       Mentor mentee report.
·       Education committee.
·       Tournament committee.
·       Longest day.
·       CBC directors.
 
The meeting was called to order by Pres. Stephani at 5:05 PM. Present were Stephani, Levinson, Wisner, Moese, Manne, Orr and Wilson.
 
The minutes as posted and slightly amended on the website were approved. The action items from last month’s meeting were reviewed:
·       The new partnership chairpersons, Joanne Earls and Chris Hastie have started their work and are making excellent progress.
·       The 2^nd half of the ACBL advertising reimbursement for learn bridge in a day has just been received courtesy of some creative badgering by Treas. Wisner.
·       The public space policy approved the last meeting has been posted on the website.
·       An email blast was set out to encourage more participation in mentor mentee.
 
The 3 priorities
·       Existing lease and new building search has had no action in the last month.
·       Zero-tolerance (now known as play friendly) has gotten as far as posting signs at the club.
·       Membership: Joanne Earls and Chris Hastie have been working on this. The 1^st edition of a renewed NLM game on Friday morning was a success with 8 tables.
 
Presidents report
·       The Anderson bridge club has purchased their Bridgemates and started using them. Pres. Stephani received an email from Helen Ogle informing him that Debbie Cummings had taken charge of installing and setting up the Bridgemates. The $200 that the board approved the last meeting to pay for technical assistance to the Anderson bridge club will be sent to Debbie Cummings.
·       The new refrigerator for the club is in place and awaiting installation (that actually happened on Friday the 17^th). It is a lower freezer arrangement and does contain an icemaker.
·       Since signs are pointing to a larger than usual attendance at the flying pig regional in June, there’s been discussion about how to come up with some additional tables. Pres. Stephani will speak with Lexington about perhaps borrowing tables from them for the week. We have 665 bidding boxes on hand which should be adequate. For the pairs games of the tournament, we will use our 40 Bridgemates, 20 from northern Kentucky and 40 from Dayton.
 
Treas.’s report
·       A preliminary income statement and balance sheet was sent by email to the board members. Since our policy now is to review this in detail only once a quarter, this interim report was simply to keep everybody up-to-date.
·       Jerry Katz has volunteered to assist with monitoring of our utility bills. He found an alternative electrical supplier who should be able to save us some money during the cooling season. In addition, he has recommended and we have turned the gas off for the summer. Even discounting the turnoff fee and the restart fee, since we use no gas during the summer we will save money.
 
Mentor mentee
·       Most of the matching for the mentor mentee program has been done and Bob Fisk sent out a preliminary list.
·       Although the number of participants is down slightly from last year, everyone who wanted to be a mentee has been assigned to a mentor.
·       We have approximately 50 pairs in the program this year.
·       The 1^st game is Wednesday, May 29. The balance of the schedule is posted on the website.
 
Education committee
·       Mike Purcell has sent a preliminary report on the learn bridge in a day event to all board members (shown at the end of these minutes).
·       The feedback from the survey done at the end of the event was very positive however so far we have seen very little conversion of people who came to the event to lessons and/or duplicate play.
·       The education committee will have further analysis to do on how we should proceed with this event in the future.
·       Adam Parrish (formerly of CBA) will be doing a seminar on opening leads at the bridge center on Saturday morning during the regional. We are glad to have him doing this and he is doing it under the same terms that we offer to other teachers.
 
Tournament committee
·       The NLM sectional is coming up very soon and we’ve had good feedback so far. There will be plenty of food at the event. We’ve also heard that 2 of the teachers from Dayton will be bringing groups of their students to play in the tournament.
·       Preparation for the regional are on track. It was confirmed that we do not plan to have speakers at the tournament. Interest in the speakers has been dwindling over the last several years and the timing of the main events at 10:00 and 2:30 makes it even more difficult to find an appropriate time for the speakers.
 
The longest day
·       The ACBL is planning a charity promotion to support Alzheimer’s. The event is to be held on Friday, June 21 (the summer solstice) and clubs are encouraged to have marathon bridge games on that day.
·       There was a discussion of how we might participate, but there was no resolution as we did not seem to have anyone willing to organize and promote additional games beyond our usual Friday morning. Pres. Stephani will discuss this with CBC coordinator Mike Lipp.
 
CBC directors
 
·       We discussed, without resolution, the problem of an aging group of directors at the bridge center. This included expressions of concern over the recent health issues of a Annease Comer.
·       Pres. Stephani has passed his test to become a club director – congratulations.
 
Other business
·       Alert editor and new board member Steve Moese requested that the chairperson of various committees submit articles on what has happened and is going to happen in the areas covered by those committees for each issue of the Alert.
·       We discussed without resolution methods to train some of our less computer savvy members in the effective use of the clubs website.
·       We discussed the ongoing attendance problems with the Tuesday evening CBA game. While there was no complete resolution and Pres. Stephani intends to create a separate committee to deal with this issue, there were some ideas presented.
o   Since Tuesday evening novice lectures have been discontinued (due to lack of attendance), we will try replacing that with a session devoted to discussing hands from the previous week’s game at 6:30 before the game.
o   During the month of September of this year, we will try starting the Tuesday evening games at 6:30 PM instead of 7 PM in hopes that the earlier start time which should lead to an earlier finish time might attract more players.
·       There was discussion of the circumstances under which we would recognize accomplishments outside of our unit at the regional or national level. No consensus was reached and the issue was referred to the webmasters and the alert editor.
 
By some happy miracle, the meeting was adjourned at 6:40 PM