January 2016 Meeting Minutes

Officers Present

* = Non-voting staff or Guest

Minutes

Continuing discussion about getting Marie Van Schoonhoven set up to do her job. The board is still working out the logistics of moving operations to Marie in Florida. We continue to sort through the IPMS/USA items in storage at MJ Kinney s house and the storage space we rent in Canton. We decided to keep Journals from the last two years and throw away/recycle/give away the rest. It was felt that since we have copies of the Journals for archival purposes, it was an unnecessary expense to continue to pay to store back issues older than two years.

President Ron Bell noted that he has one candidate for the Treasurer job but will wait until all ads have been published before moving forward.
Marie Van Schoonhoven continues to work through the backlog of merchandise orders made prior to MJ s death. We will be looking into the possibility of moving to a new vendor who can provide drop-shipment service for these items in the future.
Treasurer John Shimek announced that he sent a check for our liability and bonding insurance earlier this month. It covers financial bonding of the executive board.
It was decided that the office manager will handle future corporate renewals for the Society and that Marie Van Schoonhoven will be the contact person.
Webmaster Eric Aitala has completed work on a new shopping cart system for use with our website. The board approved the expenditure of the necessary funds to purchase the new domain name and SSL security certificate necessary for operation. After giving the board a chance to test out the new cart, President Bell gave the webmaster approval to bring it online.
A motion was made by Secretary Dennis Tennant (seconded by 1VP Dave Morrissette) to formally offer Marie Van Schoonhoven the Office Manager job at a salary of $24,600/year, effective back to December 2015. The motion passed by unanimous vote.

An ad for Treasurer will appear in the next Journal and it will also be on the website.
Still no reports of anything "bad" coming from the loss of the office manager s laptop.

Last year ended at 934 reviews; down 10% from previous year. We need more reviewers.

Convention Update
- Room night count is a little over 1200, We have sold out the initial Vendor Room of 297 tables. There are actually more tables that are available due to the original room dimensions being undersized.
Convention management software
- Working with two companies right now trying to come up with a solid price. Features from both the companies are about the same except on is a fixed pricing verse A la carte. Will be shown a demo of one of the systems later in January and invited board members to attend the web demo.
- I am also looking into the benefits of opening a Office Depot Business Account to handle purchases of office supplies for the Office Manager as well as annual conventions. I will look into this further and report back to the board during the next board meeting, if possible.

Working to update the e-board contact list for 2015. My goal is to have the update complete before the end of this quarter.
I?ll also be sending out conflict of interest forms to all e-board members soon. I?ll send a blank form along to Larry, Jim and Dave for their direct reports to fill out. I?ll also be sending a C of I form along to Mark P. so he can have all his section judges do the same. Please make this a priority, it takes only a few minutes to do and will allow me to get this chore over with and have on file for the IRS before the end of 2015.

Chapter renewal at about 85%. Sent out a reminder to delinquent chapters last night. I plan to modify the rechartering process next year to make it easier for all and to place the responsibility on the chapters/members to validate their membership data.
I have one more interview to complete for the RC-3 replacement and then I will approach the Board with my recommendation.

International Plastic Modelers' Society / USA