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 20^th 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.