Administration Team

Minutes of Meeting: January 8, 2009

Present: Ron Bennett, Deb Sandler, Guy Gledhill, Chris Mills, Jim Otis and Cyndi Alden. Excused: Eben Marsh.

The meeting was called to order by the Meeting Chair Ron Bennett at 7:05 p.m. Jim Otis was appointed Meeting Secretary and Chair for the next meeting. Guy Gledhill graciously volunteered to take over after Jim.

The minutes of the December 4, 2008 meeting were reviewed and accepted.

OLD BUSINESS:
Financial Statements and Budget: Cyndi lead a review of our financial statements and budget for the 12 months ended 12/31/08. The good news was that the financials reflected a tentative loss of $(4,578), which is much lower then the budgeted loss of $(28,176) for the year. Overall, revenues were higher and expenses were lower. The higher revenue was generally the result of additional new member pledges this past April and May, along with additional pledges of about $8,000 from existing members during the last month or so of the year (we felt this was probably the result of John McCall mentioning our fiscal situation to the congregation). The further good news is that the final year end loss may be even less. We perused the maintenance expense account and the rental property income account and found about $3,700 of capital expenditures that should be charged (and paid from) Major Maintenance funds ($1,500 from maintenance (electric) expenses and $2,200 of appliances/improvements in the rental property account). Thus, the loss could be $3,700 less, but there probably will be $1,000 or so of final expense bills trickling in which will increase the loss. Cyndi said that, in the future, she will check with the House Committee when she receives larger maintenance bills to be sure that they are charged appropriately to operations or to Major Maintenance funds.

The A Team then decided it was a good time to talk about the 2009 budget and the two (2) 10% expense reduction goals that Chris Keiter had mentioned. After carefully reviewing the expense accounts under the A Team’s jurisdiction, the following reductions were agreed upon: (1) reduce Advertising from $2,150 to $1,000 (no newspaper advertising for Easter, etc.); (2) reduce Office Expense from $13,000 to $12,000; (3) reduce Stewardship expense from $1,600 to $1,100; and (4) reduce Conference expenses from $2,000 to $1,000. Together with the 50% withdrawal of $722 from the Garden Memorial Fund to offset maintenance expense, expense savings and additional receipts related to the 2009 budget will total $4,372, or about 15% of the Administration expense budget for 2009.

Tenant review: Both tenants in the corner building are still delinquent for December. Old Crow Gallery owes $1,200 and the upstairs residential tenant owes $560. Old Crow did pay the late fees we assessed them during 2008. We will monitor this closely.

COMMITTEE REPORTS:
Counting: To date, the system appears to be working fine and Brian is doing a great job.

House: House Committee member Guy said everything was moving along fine and that the Committee didn’t meet in the last month and there was no formal report.

Planned Giving: Ron handed out a draft of a Planned Giving outline prepared by Committee Member Ellie Baker. The draft was of an educational nature and that is what the focus is intended to be. Ellie did a nice job over viewing what a planned gift is and the general ways of giving. This may go into the Beacon in the future, but the priority right now is to get the church budget finalized and approved. The Committee may want to put quarterly articles in the Beacon. In regard to possibly maintaining an “honor roll” of church members who put the church in their wills, it was felt that this wasn’t appropriate for various reasons. The Committee will be giving thought as to who the contact person (s) may be if someone wants to make a planned gift to the church.

NEW BUSINESS:
Rentals from Non-Profits: Chris Keiter has requested the A Team to address the topic of charging non-profit organizations that use the church’s facilities. We thought that more information is needed before making any decisions. For the next meeting, Cyndi will create an inventory of which non-profit groups use the church and how much they paid for 2008. Cyndi will also provide us with the present church guidelines (and perhaps the standard rental agreement we use). We also discussed having the Boy Singers of Maine use the church and we felt this sounded fine. The preliminary consensus was that we should charge those organizations who use our facilities and make money by doing this (i.e. charge fees for a concert, etc.).

The meeting was adjourned at 8:47 p.m.
Next Meeting: Thursday, February 5, 2009

Respectfully submitted by: Jim Otis, Meeting Secretary