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VCC and ACAV, together on the sand??? 20-Sep-2019 At 9:33:51 AM mountaineer

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On 19-Sep-2019 Crepuscular wrote:

>The club appears to be just squirreling money away for no justified reason
>- i.e. they could be charging members less than half what they do and still
>be in the black.
Not really. There are plenty of expenses and the financial reports will be presented at the AGM. E.g. the Access and Environment Officer role is a paid position, there are the bouldering walls to take care of (three of them) or the recent Access Is No Accident campaign.

> Why? The previous year there was an even bigger surplus.
>I don't seem to have the accounts for years prior to that so I'm not sure
>how long this has been going on, but the club now has well over $100K hoarded
>away that was apparently mostly collected from membership fees from just
>a couple of hundred members. How do they justify this??
It's not 100k but it is substantial. The plan is to make the AE Officer a FTE. In the current situation that seems to be an obvious choice.

>
>Most of the rest of the money appears to have been to support the role
>of the access / environmental officer. However that person has now quit
>the position. I accept that was a useful role and a benefit to the climbing
>community as a whole. No complaints about the person who was doing it,
>and I understand she'd been doing it for a while so she was of course entitled
>to relinquish it, but there was obviously no succession plan. Apparently
>nobody has been filling this role for some months now but we VCC mugs keep
>paying for it even though it should benefit the whole climbing community.
There are negotiations in place to make the AE role a joint role across several organisations. That hasn't been finalised yet.

>Now the VCC apparently want to INCREASE membership fees to $88
Not really. The membership fee increases to $88 if the members to decide to affiliate with the ACAV, otherwise it's $78

>As far as I recall, when all the access stuff blew
>up in the media and climbers were being portrayed as environmental vandals
>the VCC president was completely MIA.
It was a shit-fight sparked by Mike Tomkins. There was nothing to win. The recent Triple J piece was much better and there the VCC got involved.

>Unfortunately I don't think I'll be able to get along to the VCC AGM next
>week, but I really hope something changes as it's pretty obvious to me
>the VCC is an outfit now in serious and very overdue need of significant
>reform.
What needs to change in your eyes? The communication to the members? There's definitely room for improvement.