by Dave Pratt
AONE Treasurer

On Tuesday, October 15th, the AONE Board of Directors convened at Dave Pratt’s house for a business meeting. (Well, okay, pizza chomping was on the agenda as well.) In attendance were President Tom Lesko, Directors Jim Miga, Jonathan Kirshtein, and Peter Walker, Legal Counsel Kevin Murphy, and Treasurer Dave Pratt.

Tom Lesko has taken over stewardship of AONE’s tools-for-loan program and showed us an example of his new bagging and labeling system. We also discussed methods for assuring that tools out on loan are returned to the Club’s inventory in a timely fashion. See Tom’s write-up about our new tools-for-loan policy.

The Treasurer presented a brief report that primarily indicated that the Club’s bank balance has declined from about $6000 three years ago to about $4500 today. This is primarily due to the fact that Velocissima has been published monthly during that period, and the costs of printing and mailing the newsletter outweigh the income from our share of AROC annual dues and advertising revenue. The Board discussed options for addressing the effect of publishing Velocissima on our bank balance (i.e. causing it to diminish by about $500/year), and came up with the following solution:

It was decided that we will simply drop the number of issues that we print per year from the current 12 down to 10, publishing a couple of combined issues during the winter months, e.g. December-January and February-March. This saves $220 per issue, nearly making up for the deficit. (Advertisers, don’t fret: if you’ve pre-paid for 12 issues, your ad will appear in 12 issues.) We hope that more and more of you will continue to join our online-only program, because every one of you who does saves our club $18 a year! Sign up now by sending an email to webmaster@velocissima.com. With fewer issues printed throughout the year, it’s even more imperative that you keep in touch by going online!

Also discussed at the meeting were initial plans for our annual Winter Party, to be held in the doldrums of winter (late January or early February), and the possibility of adding more AONE items to our Club Store. No decisions were made on the latter, although club jackets and baseball caps were suggested. If you have any thoughts or desires on the subject (or any other, for that matter), please contact any one (or more) of our Directors.

Not discussed at the meeting was our upcoming National Convention in 2004. It was decided to save this topic for a separate meeting, at which all of the Convention Committee members would participate. (Besides, Convention Chairman Brian Shorey was in the Far East at the time.)