Council 2007 12

When: 19 Dec 2007
Place: Meeting room
Facilitator: martin (Oso was absent)
Scribe: laurel
Minutes Checker: Marie
Attendance: Richard, Cliff, Seamus, Marie, matteo, Dave

Old Commits

Marie and Oso offer to play roles on new building project CARRYOVER
Oso will send info on ewaste registration to the legislation list DROP
Dave will make sure FG gets registered appropriately UNNECESSARY

Does not apply to us, registration is for manufacturers

Reports

Budget

[Seamus reports] Working towards auditability. Early numbers for Q4 look good.

Space control

[matteo reports] Major themes:

Renting: cheaper, more flexible, less board work, riskier
Buying: expensive, hard to find what we need
Building: get what we want, expensive, time-consuming

Dave: We should plan on a timeline of decreasing dreams - plan on building, work on fundraising, if we can't make it, downgrade to working on buying, etc.

Marie: Foundations want to know that you already have a certain amount of control over the project, have the land already. We need to know more about/be clearly committed to the project before asking for any big capital grant requests.

Seamus: building has a few benefits over buying, especially in that we can connect with many people and orgs in town. Acquiring land separately from the building gives us more flexibility in fundraising.

Marie: You are expected to raise money from all other sources before going to a foundation on a capital campaign. Before asking for anything, you need information - cost per square foot is a start, a minimal start.

RFS: This is likely to be a complex project; we'll need a project manager to be a point person & juggle the details.

Marie: Renovating may be just as good as building, if we find the right building. We should send a group of people to the PDC to talk to them about finding space.

Dave: We should have a committee of board/staff/etc who can deal with the building stuff and communicate whenever there's anything new.

Seamus: need to have some people come up with approximate numbers for each of the options. Consider zoning, lot cost, transit accessability.

Dave: we should get numbers on the value of our work in the community, what we save taxpayers and other organizations.

Marie: we can make this happen if we decide to make this happen and all work really hard.

We need an action group to work on this. Should have Marie, another board member, a staff member. Marie/Laurel/? (Dave? Jeff?)

Next meeting

January 16
Facilitator: Laurel
Scribe: Tera, or failing that, martin

Commits

Dave will write up something about the (financial) value of our work in the community
Staff will talk about who on staff will be able to be on the building action committee
Building action group will meet, organize their thoughts, and try to make first contact with PDC
Some subset of the building folk will make estimates for the different actions
martin/matteo will make a secure wiki for the building folk