Several people still question why the concern over the minutes being pulled from the newsletter. While this is my first concern, fiscal responsibility associated with the newsletter is also a major concern.
I feel that the minutes are extremely important in the newsletter because it puts them in front of the entire neighborhood where they are more likely to read them. Making them available on the web means only those of us that have computers and visit the website can read them. Making them available via snail mail from Association Management means that we have to make an effort to get them and it introduces an additional cost to the association. Let?’s face it, as a culture most people will not go out of their way to call AM for the minutes; however we will read them when presented to us.
The minutes were supposedly removed from the newsletter to reduce costs, considering that, here are the questions as I remember them, and I respectfully ask the board to answer thoroughly.
1) Who on the Board has direct oversight of the Newsletter, and is ultimately responsible for its content?''
2) Why is it that one person (the NL editor who is not a board member) can determine how the newsletter money is spent by printing meaningless articles and wordsearches? (Even though 2 pages in the last newsletter were free, there were several other pages of useless articles and word searches.)
3) Why does the president?’s letter repeat most of the information from other sections of the newsletter?
4) Did the Imaginarium pay for their quarter page advertisement in last month?’s newsletter?
5) Why was it determined that the meeting minutes are not useful to ALL the residents of the community?
6) If reducing cost is a high priority why not find other means to do so rather then eliminate the minutes? Were other means of reducing cost of the newsletter considered prior to eliminating the minutes? Some ideas would be to eliminate the fancy boarders and fonts, eliminating unnecessarily large/bold fonts, limit unpaid ads in the line ads section to 6 single spaced lines or less, don?’t duplicate anything but the most important items in the presidents letter, etc.
7) Once the decision was made to eliminate the minutes in order to reduce costs, why did the annual budget for the newsletter actually go up? (it is understood that there are constantly new homes in the neighborhood, but one would expect this to at the most offset the 15-20% savings of eliminating the minutes.)
8) For the 2004 budget was the printing of the newsletter put out to bid as other expenses of the association are? If not, why?
By Penny Pincher
I feel that the minutes are extremely important in the newsletter because it puts them in front of the entire neighborhood where they are more likely to read them. Making them available on the web means only those of us that have computers and visit the website can read them. Making them available via snail mail from Association Management means that we have to make an effort to get them and it introduces an additional cost to the association. Let?’s face it, as a culture most people will not go out of their way to call AM for the minutes; however we will read them when presented to us.
The minutes were supposedly removed from the newsletter to reduce costs, considering that, here are the questions as I remember them, and I respectfully ask the board to answer thoroughly.
1) Who on the Board has direct oversight of the Newsletter, and is ultimately responsible for its content?''
2) Why is it that one person (the NL editor who is not a board member) can determine how the newsletter money is spent by printing meaningless articles and wordsearches? (Even though 2 pages in the last newsletter were free, there were several other pages of useless articles and word searches.)
3) Why does the president?’s letter repeat most of the information from other sections of the newsletter?
4) Did the Imaginarium pay for their quarter page advertisement in last month?’s newsletter?
5) Why was it determined that the meeting minutes are not useful to ALL the residents of the community?
6) If reducing cost is a high priority why not find other means to do so rather then eliminate the minutes? Were other means of reducing cost of the newsletter considered prior to eliminating the minutes? Some ideas would be to eliminate the fancy boarders and fonts, eliminating unnecessarily large/bold fonts, limit unpaid ads in the line ads section to 6 single spaced lines or less, don?’t duplicate anything but the most important items in the presidents letter, etc.
7) Once the decision was made to eliminate the minutes in order to reduce costs, why did the annual budget for the newsletter actually go up? (it is understood that there are constantly new homes in the neighborhood, but one would expect this to at the most offset the 15-20% savings of eliminating the minutes.)
8) For the 2004 budget was the printing of the newsletter put out to bid as other expenses of the association are? If not, why?
By Penny Pincher
