August 3rd 2011, River Meeting

who's here

Margery, Vinny, natasha, paul, harold, bill, chris, ryan, shad, chicken, on phone: mai and jim

trip reports

AARS: 25 participants. 7 boats. gorge twice. one flip in lower haystacks, five other swimmers. no injuries. they made us a lovely poster. camped at ARR.  had to rent gear: some wetsuits for larger ppl, and and two boats and paddles. blaster and propane tank are in oakland shed. we could probably use some more x/xxl

sscf: 2nd time this year. different group. first group was oak high. this group was continuation program at hildat-fremont. a lot of kids were in gangs. this group was a lot more prepped than last year's. smaller group. less high-maintenance. worked really well. they came in a big yellow school bus. for dinner, went to z-pies ! flows at 3700.

cameron house: we've taken them many times. demographic was almost all chinese. very organized, very fun to work with. very high functioning. everything went smoothly. flows at 2400 (!).

star house: small trip. ryan stepped in for jon. there were only 3 star house residents, 2 staff, and 4 sj ico. jon will do peninsula boys. river is back to normal. very smooth. jon did most of the legwork before trip; gloria did most of the work over the trip. only one swim. ryan chose to run after 2. made it to fowlers at 4. reservoir is full.

bill - if we tell rafter's toe to charge to account, we will save 15%

ice fundraiser: most of logistics are done. now, focus on publicity. most of the signups have known someone in ICO. ideally, we would like to have one ICO person in each boat to talk about ICO, etc (if the boats are loaded. to be checked off with AO, you need to be checked off three days with an AO person. jared is the contact for this (this has gotten more stricter with this, so no wiggle room). ryan has maybe gotten an announcement into the yodeler (?). craigslist. contact last year's attendees and fundraiser dinner.

finance: thanks to mary. in summary, the budget, we planned about spending $7000 more than we took in. had a certain amount of money accruing over the past two years. finance built the budget about $7500 for trip cost. $4170 have been spent. overall, we've spent $700 more than we collected. it's misleading because we haven't had the fundraiser. we still have about $3300 for trips now. training had been budgeted about $3000 to cover trip leaders and trainers for BT and BB. only $1000. of project liferaft, we've used about half of it. encourage more trips to use the $500 subsidy.

committees:

training: ryan is sending out emails to training. margery has sent out about surveys. next year's training is kind of undefined because of what happened this year. hence, ryan wanted to talk about what we should do. we have a bunch of people who are half-trained. we promised to complete their training. we also have people who haven't gone through the training. how much room does that leave for fresh new applicants. we need to make the decision sooner, to prevent a lot of controversy. the past two years we've been impacted with california budget costs with marshall gold and gorge takeout closed. we should expect that marshall gold to be closed next year. possible idea: bt in april ? we would probably spill into may. training committee should decide what to do with last year's trainees, since they cancelled bt. harold observes that there seems to be a lack of clarity over who gets to decide what. this had an impact on this year's training. is the steering committee setting policy because of what ICO needs to go ? or does the training coordinator have say in what happens and how much ? it's a good idea to poll the trainees, but we also need to take a look at who is doing what. WE NEED A BT COORDINATOR.

selection: selection be confidential. make selection meeting beforehand to be mandatory, to have the committee know the applicants better and know what goals for the selection committee. ryan notes that we had too many people helping and disseminating information, which didn't get done in what was meant to be done. ryan also thinks we should order pizza. 

institutional permitting process:

[Note From Ryan C, 20120919: A page has been dedicated to the Institutional Permitting Process.]

chicken is very suspicious of attempts to have institutions sign anything. he intends to go to meeting. mel also.

vinny: the more ppl showing up to represent ICO the better.

harold: are we making contact with the other institutions. we have been in contact with project go, healing waters, and OA. should we contact beale, travis, project go, hw, cavalry chapel, etc.

vinny: the three fundraising trips are a slippery slope. having paid staff is slippery slope. these are not concessions that are all mutual for all the groups. the commercial groups feel that they did not want to shoulder the monetary burden.

ryan: is the criticism about the quality of our guides ? taking up too much space at  put-in, takeout ?

margery: what groups are being taken off the institutional groups ? we should get an idea about the ecology of the permits. county user fees.

harold: there needs to be a clear definition that not all institutionals can be lumped in together. at the same time, we can't demonize FoR.

bill: we're not without support from the river community.

margery: point 13 !!! yuck !!!!

vinny: we are a 501c.4, not c3.

natasha: recruit the young'uns to come to the meeting as well.

ryan needs guides for castlemont

margery needs guides for benicia.

chris and caroline did river cleanup. it was fun.