President's Perspective: Vacation is over, back to work
A short vacation and the people who make the sport great
Each year, the officers of AMA give up one column to enable the magazine to enhance its coverage of the Nats. For some, it is a welcome respite; for others, it is not a universally acclaimed policy. I actually did take a vacation trip this year, visiting aeromodeling friends in Ireland and attending the wedding of one of their daughters. The trip proved, once again, that it's the people who make the sport of model aviation so great.
Budget process and priorities
Among the challenges your officers face is developing a budget for the organization. It's an interesting process that takes a lot of time. You usually start by establishing assumptions for factors such as interest rates, inflation, and membership growth or shrinkage. Just establishing those factors can be very challenging, and a lot of guesswork is involved.
For example, we had previously decided to reduce the cost of membership for all youth categories to $1; now we are forced to estimate a specific number of youth members we expect to join in 1998. Any number you put down is a guess, but it's a consensus guess. Once the assumptions are made, the income side of the budget is largely a matter of mathematics.
The expense side follows. The typical sequence is:
- Determine what it will cost to continue doing the same things next year as this year.
- Add the costs of programs or other expenses approved by the Executive Council.
- If anything is left over, consider capital budget requests from the various departments.
That's the way the budget has been done for quite a few years. As you can see, the process depends heavily on continuing to do business as has been done in the past. The problem is that with the small drop-off in membership we have been experiencing, there is simply not enough money to continue to fund all of the "traditional" programs, and much less to fund the "new" programs deemed necessary by the Executive Council or staff.
The bottom line is that we need to realign our budgeting priorities, recognizing that some "traditional" programs will have to be allowed to sunset in order to provide funding for programs deemed more productive in today's times. This will undoubtedly affect some members, and those members will vociferously defend the programs they have been part of, but it is simply a matter of priority.
Election problems and reballoting
Can AMA ever get an election right? This might seem a strange question from your President, but our recent track record has been somewhere between awful and miserable.
The latest way we have managed to mess up an election was having the P.O. Box closed when the returns started coming in. This wasn't a sinister plot; what happened was that the box belonging to our auditors is used only for AMA's election returns, so it isn't checked regularly during the summer months. The Post Office decided to put the renewal notice in the box rather than mail it to the auditor's office as they have done in past years. Two notices were sent; the Post Office assumed the auditor didn't want to continue the box and reissued it to another customer.
When the first returns started coming in, ballots with return addresses were returned to the sender, and those without a return address were destroyed. We first realized we had a problem when an alert member who had gotten his ballot back called to ask what was going on. We do not have any way to recover those ballots, nor any absolute way to determine exactly how many were lost. We do know that the problem was discovered after only four or five days, and the best estimate of how many ballots were involved is "around 200."
Our auditor has accepted complete responsibility for this problem. After much consideration, we decided to reballot districts II and VI, but to accept the results of districts IV, VIII, and X unless the returns show a very heavy write-in vote in one of those districts.
This decision was based on a couple of factors:
- Districts II and VI are the closest districts to both the point from which the ballots were sent and where they were returned to. Combined with the fact that the lost ballots were the first ones returned, it is probable that the vast majority of the lost ballots came from those districts.
- Candidates in districts IV, VIII, and X are running unopposed. It is extremely unlikely that the first ballots cast in those districts would be for a write-in candidate in the absence of any known write-in campaign. In any case, if a write-in candidate were to emerge with a significant number of votes, we would reballot that district as well.
I feel confident that the action we have taken will result in the election being completed with the mistake having no effect on the results. Again, I apologize, and I give you my word that we will try to do better next year. Looking at the bright side, we haven't made the same mistake twice—yet!
In memoriam: Jim Shinohara
It is with much sorrow that I report a tragedy in the ranks of modelers around the world. During the F3D (RC Pylon Racing) World Championships in the Czech Republic, Jim Shinohara, a caller on the U.S. team, was stricken with a heart attack on the field. Immediate CPR kept Jim alive and got him to the hospital in a coma. Approximately six weeks later, on October 7, we received word that Jim had passed away without regaining consciousness.
Best known as the spirit and leader of the Samurai Racing team, he will be sorely missed by everyone who knew him. On behalf of all AMA members, I'd like to express condolences to his family and friends. I doubt any of those who knew him will ever again hear a firecracker go off without thinking of him.
Till next month,
Dave Brown AMA President
Transcribed from original scans by AI. Minor OCR errors may remain.
