Present: Bill, Gerry, Karen, Gina, and Todd
The meeting started off with a review of the membership counts. Gerry noticed that there were a lot of people in their 50's joining. We have 57 members for 2005. We got a lot of members at the Dome table, and we're just now starting to get renewals.
We also reviewed the minutes of the last two meetings and came up with some changes. It would help to have the minutes posted sooner after the meetings so they can be reviewed while they are fresh in people's minds.
We took a look at the budget for the year just finished. Fiscal year 2004's expenses included two printings of T-shirts (2004 shirts near the beginning of the fiscal year, and 2005 shirts at the end of the fiscal year), so we are in good shape. The bulk of our expenses have come in already, but the bulk of the renewals are yet to come in. We would like to get up to 100 members this year. To help with this, Mike at the Dome said we can have a table whenever we want, as long as we don't block Rollerbob's table.
Gerry e-mailed the organizers of the Thunder Bay inline marathon. They haven't made their final decision yet, though they will let Gerry know when the decision has been made. It doesn't really sound like the marathon will be happening.
David Yantos, a club member, offered to have his graphic arts students design a new banner and a logo for the club. This would be a class project for students at a technical college. They will most likely come up with a few proposals which we can then review. We could then use the logo on the Web site and on a new banner. The old ones are looking a little dated. Spencer offered to make a new banner, since his company does this kind of work. This might be at a small cost to the club.
Noelle's site, freeinlinelessons.com, is now up. (This is not freeskatelessons.com.) I need to add a link on the MISC web site. Bill is designing this, so he would like us to review it and see if anything looks broken or missing. They don't plan to duplicate anything that our club does. The spring picnic will be Noelle's first event in conjunction with our group.
We reviewed the graphical map of skate trails that Todd prepared for the Web site. Comments were generally positive, and people like the ability to click on trails to get to the reviews. Bill offered some suggestions that should improve the ability to read and print the map. For instance, yellow shows up as a very light gray when printing, and the highway signs could be redesigned.
Speaking of trails, Gina offered to check and see if Long Lake has been repaved yet. Gerry offered to see if Purgatory Creek is done yet, though Todd doesn't think it's done. (I work near the trail, and the last news I have on it is that they are compacting the soil to provide a solid base for part of the trail.) We should come up with a list of all the trails we can think of, then ask people to review them. This would include a list of the criteria we are looking for.
We aren't sure if we need to have a meeting next month. We may be able to do business via e-mail, or we can put up files and have discussions at the board area of the discussion board (http://www.skateminnesota.org/discuss).