World Service Office Board of Directors Meeting
March 14,1996 Proposed Minutes
MEETING was called to order at 7:30 PM
SERENITY PRAYER led by Scott
TRADITION TEN was read by Chuck
CONCEPT TEN was read by Lee ROLL CALL
Scott Stevenson, Chairperson
Jeff Schachter, Vice Chair
Ed Godfrey, Treasurer
Chuck McCollum, Secretary
K.D. Zager, WSO Director of Operations
Brian North, WSO Trustee
Roger Gray, WS Trustee
Lee Arter, Pacific South Regional Trustee
QUORUM was met
The meeting was called to order at 7:30 PM with a teleconference with the WSBT Chair regarding Old Business item: 2nd printing of Storybook. Teleconference was terminated at 7:50 PM when the regular meeting began. Summary of teleconference in new business.
Motion: To approve minutes of February 22, 1996. Seconded. PASSED.
OFFICER’S REPORTS
Chairperson: Scott reported that he has some information re the Employee compensation survey that he will discuss in Old Business. • Also, he has the financial analysis nearly completed. The annual financial statements need to be corrected. The mistakes were allocation errors, due to inconsistency in item coding. Scott will work with Brown & Co,, our accountants, as well as our Director of Operations to iron these problems out. While there will be no corrected copies generated, Scott intends to include in his report that, “there was an allocation error in the financial statements which should have indicated that each individual Trustee was charged a pro-rata share of the amount that was inadvertently charged 100% to the World Service Office Trustee.” In general, in the body of the financial statements, we have tried to create subsidiary schedules that support the income statement, (which is not named as such since we are a nonprofit organization), the allocation of which is to the office and the Trustees. The order that the chart of accounts allocates them needs to be changed so that the office gets all of the business activities and their allocations and the Trustees simply get their own individual charges. The bottom line is that we will have an allocation to Trustees included in the financial statements.
Vice Chair: Jeff is back from Costa Rica. The board welcomes him home. No report.
Page of 1 of 5
Treasurer: Ed reports that we are up to date on our reserve contribution, • The Raddisson has issued us a bill; everything looks in order.
Secretary: Chuck is glad to be back. He reports that he will be need to attend to yet more family business in New York, during the last half of April, so he will miss the board meeting of April 25.
TRUSTEE REPORTS
WSO Trustee: Brian reported that all information he had to offer was covered in the teleconference with the WSBT Chair.
WS Trustee: Roger reported that he has been working with Ed Godfrey on the health plan packages. • The LA area is producing a PSA that they will shoot this coming weekend. They plan to forward a copy to WSO as well as bring the finished product to the floor of the conference in August for approval on the World level.
P.S. Regional Trustee: Lee reported that there will be a Delegate Workshop on Saturday the 16th at 3:00 PM at his home; an orientation for new WS Delegates re GSO meetings and Conferences. • He and Brian attended the San Gabriel/Pamona Convention in Laughlin, NV, and it was a huge success. • CampVention is coming up April 19-21 at Lake Paris; it is one of the only fund raisers for all the areas in the PS region, • Central California’s 1st area convention will take place right before the WS Convention. • The PS regional slate is: Carrie C., Meredith A., and Joe S….Alternates: Susan T. & Ken C.
Attendance at regional caucus was terrible. People in other parts of the country drive across two or three states to attend these; we’re having difficulty getting our people to travel much shorter distances to attend ours.
OPERATIONS REPORT – K.D. Zager
Operations Report read and incorporated into these minutes. Notable discussions:
- Letter to Letourneu: completed, not sent.
- 2nd printing: Do we have current version on disk? Discussion TABLED to Old Business.
- Storybook corrections: It was discussed that we need to resurrect the Storybook subcommittee to maintain the book.
- Employee Handbook: We will all take a copy home with us to peruse. We need to find out what policies have not been voted on as opposed to those that have. We will discuss at the next meeting.
OLD BUSINESS
-Video PSA’s
Page 2 of 5
Chuck has received the Spanish translations from Ed P. He has given them to one of the actors who will do the voice-over in Spanish, and she offered some suggested changes. Chuck will confer with Ed to see what he thinks of the changes before finalizing. We have three bids in various stages for the production of the three Conference approved PSA’s. KnightLine in Texas will do it for $5,000,00; Size, Inc. in LA say they can beat those numbers, but have yet to get specific, and Tell-A-Vision will match the $5,000.00 bid here in LA, although they cannot commit such a discounted rate to paper. Chuck recommends Tell-A-Vision; they are local, their reel looks the best, they were highly recommended by Film Roos, and they have been very helpful and creative in their approach. In short, Chuck has the best feeling about them.
It was suggested that, in lieu of a written bid, that Chuck have someone witness the oral agreement on the $5,000.00 quote. The Board will review the three sample reels submitted by these companies at our next meeting.
KD to make arrangements for the viewing of these reels (To-do List).
-2nd Printing of storybooks
Mike P. reported It will cost $1500.00 to make all the corrections in the 2nd printing. Also, it appears that we can get a better deal if we print 15,000 books rather than print only five thousand.
However, our Director of Operations has new information from Donnelley. Unless we go to press right away, we will have to wait a considerable time for the press; we could conceivably run out of books during that period. It was suggested that we ask Donnelley for a 20,000 book order, 5,000 to be printed right now, as is, and the other 15,000 to be printed with the corrections after the Conference. (We buy all the materials now and then we print at the same price later on). This way we will certainly not run out of books waiting for our turn on the press. We already have 5,000 softcovers in inventory needing the same corrections; this new set of 5,000 would create e a “matched set” of sorts, and the inventory would be depleted at roughly the same speed. We then could take our time making the corrections and , if it turns out at the conference that the fellowship would like to print a 2nd Edition and form a committee to work on it, then we could decide then if we want to make the corrections to hold us over until the 2nd Edition.
The consensus of this is board that if Donnelley will guarantee, in writing, that if we only print 5,000 now we can print more later at the same price, then we should go with the plan outlined above. KD will obtain numbers from Donnelley, (To-do List), Mike will pole the Trustees and we will have a decision.
At this point it was reiterated that we need to resurrect the subcommittee for the maintenance of the Storybook (see discussions under operations report.) Carrie C. has volunteered to work with KD and go over the disks we have to see if they contain the current version Carrie seems like the logical choice to do this; we would be grateful to have her do this; we need to have current disks of the Storybook. KD will determine with Carrie whether or not it is the current, correct version. (To-do List).
Page 3 of 5
-Health Care
Ed has contacted providers, also has received information that Roger brought with him tonight. KD is expecting a summary from the California Association of Nonprofit Organizations; we may be able to sign on with their group plan; their rates seem comparable to all others. Ed will also look into using a broker; it adds no cost to us; brokers receive their fees from the insurance companies. It seems that the average HMO is $100.00-150.00 per month. Ed will gather up all the plans, including Roger’s and the Nonprofit association’s, and put them all up on a spreadsheet for us to review.
-CAWS ’96
Answer to our question to the WSBT re Arrival date for the convention:
The WSBT thus far feels that those who travel on Thursday should plan on paying for their own room that night. The deadline for finalizing ail travel & accommodations will be May 1.
-Employee Compensation Survey
Scott found three different descriptions that encompass our Job Description for Director of Operations; no one description covers it. Salaries vary depending size of company, location, etc. Some of the Trustees have offered their assistance in doing further research. We would like to have this figured out by the Trustee meeting in May.
-Staff hour wages vs. budget:
TABLED until next meeting.
NEW BUSINESS
– Phone systems
As per “Questions” in operations report, a discussion took place regarding the purchasing of new phone service. We only have two lines now; people are getting the voice-mail roughly 50% of the time, irrespective of time of day. It is the consensus of this board that KD obtain three bids for new basic phone service that will solve our phone problems. Q’s: What basic system will solve the problems? What would it cost to add a fifth phone if we don’t need one now but later find we need one? KD to seek answers to these questions and more while obtaining the bids. (To-do List).
-MasterCard/Visa
KD has looked into the possibility of our accepting these Credit Cards on certain orders with a minimum purchase. Discussion TABLED pending further research into costs.
Page 4 of 5
-Software
As per Operations Report, a discussion took place regarding the purchase of one copy of Microsoft Access for convention registration.
Motion: To purchase one copy of Microsoft Access, at best possible price, for
Convention registration. Seconded. PASSED.
Motion: To adjourn at 9:44 p.m. Seconded. PASSED.
MEETING ADJOURNED at 9:44 PM with the Lord’s Prayer
Respectfully submitted,
Chuck McCollum
Page 5 of 5