April 2024 - Board Meeting

04/03/2024 - Area 515 Board Meeting

04/03/2024 - Area 515 Board Meeting

Attending:

• President: Dave

• Secretary: Brad (via Google Meet)

• Director: Jason

• Director: John

• Director: Carlin (via Google Meet)

Absent:

• Vice President: Jake

• Treasurer: Meg

Votes by Email Since Previous Board Meeting

• None

Approval of Minutes from Previous Meeting

Vote to approve minutes from March Board meeting

Yes: 5

No: 0

Result: Passed

Financials

Meg filed our taxes for 2023

Current Members: 95

We continue getting between 5-15 people for each Open House. 6 people came last night, 2 of whom signed up.

Space Updates

The new dust collector for the Wood Shop was installed and is mostly functional. No plans to replace the piping any time soon.

No further work has been done on the Rotary Phase Converter for the Metal Shop. Some more items need to be purchased to get it working.

This upcoming Saturday (4/6/24) there will be...

Metal Shop meeting in the morning

Stained Glass Window meeting at noon

All Tool Stewards and Trainers meeting at 1:30pm

Member meeting at 3:00pm

New Wood Shop Steward

Jake and Jason decided to add Isaiah as a Wood Shop Steward. The Secretary floated the idea that since Stewards are allowed to spend money from their respective tool funds, the Board should have some say in who becomes a Tool Steward. The Board subsequently decided to vote to make Isaiah a Tool Steward.

Members from both the Wood Shop and Metal Shops argued that they have a tradition of always unanimously agreeing to Tool Fund purchases. It was pointed out that this isn't true for all areas.

Vote to make Isaiah C a Wood Shop Steward

Yes: 5

No: 0

Result: Passed

Tool Fee Discussion

• The 2024 Budget presented at the last board meeting set aside $500 for each Tool Fund to spend. If each tool area has money already set aside for it in the budget, the Secretary wondered if Tool Fees should be dropped altogether for the following reasons:

• • Tool Fees are not being tracked well. The automation to connect the PayPal payments to the Tools sheet broke months ago and hasn't been fixed. (Although there is some Google Apps Script automation to update the Tools sheet based on recorded PayPal payments.)

  • Not everyone is paying their Tool Fees and Tool Stewards don't chase after people who don't pay them.

  • There has been some discussion of the Wood Shop raising its fee to $100. The Secretary feels like this would only be penalizing the members who follow the rules.

• Carlin suggested what he called a Constant Use Fee, as an alternative to the Tool Use fee. That is, a member pays a fixed amount, say $75, if that member uses an area in the space for more than, say 10 hours a week.

• The common difficulty with the options we discussed is how to enforce them.

• It was decided that this topic should be added to the agenda for both the Tool Steward and Member Meetings.

Space Updates

• One of our members got a hard time from a Merck employee for parking in our section of the courtyard area. It was on a Saturday and Merck wasn't sure who the employee was. It should be noted that we can only park in the little grassy area in the NW of the courtyard, or in the concrete section in front of our garage door.

• The board briefly discussed an SHR email that was sent out and which one of the board members had misunderstood. All was as it should be in the end.

Meeting Adjourned

• Carlin was experiencing some lag in the Google Meet and at times had to communicate by holding up fingers. Around the second or third time he had to do this, Jason remarked, "I was expecting a different finger that time."

• The last time I typed up meeting notes, I tried to save them and stupid GitBook here deleted the whole thing. When I went to save these notes, the same thing happened again.