June 2018 Board Minutes

 

San Diego Mountain Biking Association Board Meeting

Wednesday, June 27 , 2018 7:00 - 9:00 PM,

Sutton Home

For information contact: info@SDMBA.com or

Kevin Loomis President

President@sdmba.com  

Introductions/Roll Call

Susie Murphy

Don Sutton

Matt Bartelt

Joshua Bonnici

Renee Halsch

Al Allison

Ben Stone

Tim Ingersoll

Siobhan Baloochi

Kevin Loomis

 

Not present:  Jason Showalter, Skii Fleeton, Jose Galaz

 

Public Comment on Non-Agenda Items (2 mins. limit per individual; must fill out comment card prior to call to order) Opportunity for members of the public to speak to the Board on any subject matter not on tonight’s agenda

 

Call to Order 7:05 p.m.

 

Introductions    

 

Consent Agenda

    1.    Approval Meeting Minutes 05/16/2018  

 

    Kevin makes motion to approve May meeting minutes, Josh seconds, unanimously approved

 

    2.    Approval May 2018 Financials

  • Al Allison to figure out a new process to get May financials before board meeting, including a statement of activity/statement of accounts

  • Old business for next month - approval of May 2018 financials

    • Make process that is easier for everyone to see them

    • Al Allison - wants to see YTD profit loss/month profit loss

    • Link to bank reconciliation - any board member will be able to view at any time

  • Approve financials for May next meeting. Financials will always be posted the second week of the month.

    • Budget review will happen in the future

Kevin makes motion to move approval of May financials to next month, Ben seconds, unanimously approved

 

Old Business   

 

Requests for Continuance on any current Agenda items

 

Discussion Agenda  

Item 1.  Budget Review (Al) 10 mins

            2018 Actual budget

 
  • What would budget look like if we hired for a TC position?

  • Budget includes Actual YTD actual expenditures and revenue

    • Without updates that have been gone over between Ben and Al

    • More of an information item since everything has been updated since the original drafting of this budget

    • Old annual budget with actual income

    • Starts January 1 and ends June 15th

  • Membership is moving along since split on 4/29/2018.

    • Final quarter budget - paid an extra 3000 bonus from IMBA because we hit a cap over 25,000

 

            2018 revised budget showing TC position/no TC position

    • Al ran the numbers with projections: whether we hired someone or not

      • Projections with trails coordinator

      • Revised budget

    • Bumped up membership - aiming for 800 people at average $50/apiece

    • Grants - downsized from $61,000 to $40,000 - did not get the full amount budgeted.

      • What makes a grant easier to obtain is a project. Lots of projects are pending, but now it is harder to get grants without a project out of the study process

      • Should still fundraise for Black Mountain

  • Booth income - merchandise sales - funding from renting booths

  • Budget is a full year budget, but does not show current income

    • Numbers are based on being relatively on target with our budget

    • Some things are going up, some things have been adjusted

  • What has changed, in summary:

    • Membership revenue

    • Booth income

    • expenditures - line item

    • Auto expense increases : board voted to approve auto expenses as needed.

    • Payroll service - bank charges - cc fees - Bookkeeping

    • Community outreach

    • Service fees

  • What is the difference between hiring a trails coordinator with and without new budget?

    • TC salary at 4 months: $13,320

    • Revised without trails coordinator - professional fees without trails coordinator $70,000

      • 1. Hire a consultant at sycamore trails/goodan ranch

      • 2. Mount laguna. To get proposal to start NEPA process, we would have to pay similar to what we did at Orosco.

        • Someone should still be hired for Wooded Hill trail

        • Capacity to plan trails within corridor to get approval from Forest Service

        • Need to plan corridor of 50 ft and plan trail/flag. May need someone in Laguna to make adjustments

    • Professional fees would be more without a trails coordinator

    • Trails coordinator would get heavy lifting - in house knowledge being built to reduce costs in the future

    • Will save $26k by hiring someone and spend a bit over $13k. Basically, hiring this person will save $13k.

  • Orosco could be pushed into 2019 for approval based on reports and volunteer capacity - supervising ranger left so that halted/pushed back things a bit

    • Comment period/comments and support got over 500 responses. Has cemented this project as something that needs to be done.

    • Botany/hydrology has been postponed

  • Sycamore/Goodan ranch and Otay are areas to focus on

  • Hiring process has been shown to all board members

    • Hiring committee - Matt, Don, Susie to interview in the next 2 weeks

  • Tonight - need to approve job description

    • $30/hour 20 hours a week cannot do exempt until they are full-time

    • Posting of the job - approve tonight? 2 weeks. On website and facebook page.

  • Timing is critical - have to enter agreement with mount laguna and sycamore/goodan ranch.

  • Position is being posted publicly

    • Job application will go on memberleap, submit resume and contact information. Timeline is 2 weeks, go to hiring committee in order to go through screening.

    • Interviews start immediately, completed by mid-July.

    • Board meeting to be held on August 2nd. Only board meeting for August and July

    • Sept back to regular schedule

  • Hire date for trails coordinator - as soon as following week after August board meeting

    • Onboarding/payroll to be completed and agreed upon in August

  • Tighten up finances before then, should be okay without Al

  • Meeting TBA for board meeting on August 2nd for location

  • Job description for TC: has been vetted through professionals. In order to go to 40 hours a week, person needs to bring in $

    • Top 10 projects to be reported to board on a quarterly basis

    • Assist in fundraisers through grant writing

    • $30,000 to programs/projects in first year

  • Goals for this position/fundraising?

    • Important thing is to seek out opportunities for funding and projects that make sense

    • $ for projects that aren’t build-ready

    • Orosco - outside of REI, biggest projects fundraised for

 

Action item: put on as a voting item

Kevin makes motion to SDMBA to hire a coordinator for $30 an hour 20 hours a week - to post position on website as well as facebook and for 2 weeks to interview/form a committee

Matt seconds, Ben Obstains

 

Item 2.  Trails Project Coordinator position (15 mins)

    See above

 

    Item 3.  Membership and marketing update (Kevin) 5 mins

     

  • Memberleap - rocky to say the least - the membership portion of it did not work out that well

    • Database and billing system issues

 
  • Velocity X - really great idea, but did not work out that well

    • Was supposed to take care of these things but did not materialize

    • Susie has taken a lot of time to try to work with Velocity, but it has not worked out well

    • Terminate velocity X and stop this month - end it in June

      • Pay the company, finish this month out

  • The renewal system that they set up is working somewhat, but does have errors that need to be fixed

    • Catching a lot of mistakes, ex. Email for tomorrow had an error-0-0

  • Susie would like to eventually revisit someone to do marketing that is more of a contact creator/sports minded and understands industry and mission. Social media and engagement to drive people to member page

    • Still 9 steps to sign up to be a member - need to get this in order from join page and after. Losing 70% of people after getting to join page

    • Keep investing in social media/ads

  • Get the process fixed: plan

    • Al helping Susie sign up for authorize.net. Cut down steps and streamline payment process/auto-renewal. Can store CC information

    • 1 or 2 step process to sign up, then could choose level of engagement

    • Membership renewal needs to be fixed - have a lot of members that need to renew that we need to keep.

  • Creating a new username and password is confusing for renewing members

  • This discussion should be committee-focused instead of board-focused.

  • Membership numbers - since we became SDMBA only, we have collected more than 20k in sdmba dues!

    • Have not done social media pushes, membership renewal wasn’t working as well as anticipated. Will hit projected goal easily

    • Trial memberships for trek will expire and campaign will continue before they expire - hopefully good conversion rate when memberships come up for renewal!

 

    Item 4.  Mission Statement Committee Report (Tim, Matt)

  • Press release - summarize in 50 words what the organization is all about. Cut down on about us paragraph to keep it clean and simple.

    • SDMBA is a volunteer-led, nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing sustainable trail access for mountain biking in San Diego county.

  • Comments:

    • Volunteer-driven over volunteer-led

    • Do we want or need the word advocacy in mission statement? No, volunteers and increasing is advocacy

    • Don’t want to get too wordy

    • Maintaining and increasing in the taglines?

    • Don - a lot of what we do is maintenance

  • Just look at boilerplate and mission statement now, circle back to these things later on

  • Need to be an MTB specific organization - Ben - we do not necessarily need a different mission statement with a softer image

  • Susie - needs something to plug into a grant application, along with a tagline (one short sentence with 7-10 words)

  • More tagline concepts? Sit with them for a bit. Please look over this and prepare some suggestions/questions/comments

  • Matt - tagline - last one is the strongest “increasing trail access for MTB since 1994”

 

    Item 5.  Trails Committee Report (Don)

  • Mainly focusing on putting together a database of trails in SD county.

    • Trailforks has a good database already on all trails

    • You can download trail maps from the website

  • Trailforks Features

    • You can select columns that you would like to download. Can update columns and can download as a csv/spreadsheet

    • Don has downloaded and put into an excel spreadsheet.

    • Tool on trailforks to make maps

    • Map making tool - can make vectorized maps

    • Issues

      • Naming of the trails. Named by the uploaders. Issues with trail names being correct

      • Land manager/region title need to be correct. Title of the trail itself

      • Some quality control that needs to be done before adoption. Will allow edits to be input.

      • What would have to happen - Don would have to select trail, go in and edit trail as an admin

      • Would be difficult to do for every trail

      • Would be nice to trailforks to be cleaned up in San Diego - many people use it.

  • Example - pulling out trails that are decommissioned and correctly adding in new trails can be done on Trailforks.

    • Don is not able to delete trails yet, but can enter trails as unsanctioned. Trail can possibly be taken off the map.

  • MTB project also needs to be cleaned up - a little easier, more options

  • TrailForks is run by Brett Hillier - FrontLines MTB from Canada. Please listen to his podcast!

  • MTB Project - funded by REI, has rock climbing, hiking, skiing apps as well

  • Both are good for navigation, Trailforks is better to download from and to potentially have as a database in order to have maps made for SD county

    • Could hand off this database with trail maps, etc.

    • Kevin - data is not all accurate

  • We get some small donations through Trailforks!

  • Questions:

    • Q1: How easy is it to add back trails? Can people put a tag on it to make sure trail isn’t added back?

      • A: Trail goes through moderation before it is put in. Ex. Don has to approve requests to approve trail. Will refer to liaisons to make sure trail is legit. Approves about 5 per day.

  • Will use mapping data at trailheads in the future

  • Can put up trailforks logo, other logos on the SDMBA website

    • A lot of riders would appreciate maps like this

    • Widget for trailforks to embed into website

  • 5 areas of trails: North Coastal, Central coastal foothills, South coastal foothills, Mountains, 1 other area

  • Use these in the future to compare to public trails maps

 

    Item 6.  Sponsorship Committee (Joshua)

  • Susie and Josh have been working on sponsorship newsletter going out in July - still get emails from the last one.

    • Outlining projects, asking for donations, saving the dates for Arch Ride.

    • Trailfest - committee meetings will happen in the future on that.

      • Full of bike demos, is going to be amazing, 7 companies are doing bike demos

      • Dates - October 12-14 is the trailfest

      • Sponsorship spots are full for trailfest. There will be official beer for event

      • Finalizing details on events/scheduling. Volunteers are needed, ride leads, scavenger hunt. Ask karen for any volunteer opportunities

  • Susie - has document of membership discounts and promo codes.

    • File archive is difficult to use - made a board under the forum under communications, including member discounts and promo codes.

    • Need to get people to the forum! We can lead people there by drawing them to the website. Forum is much easier than file archive.

    • Hollywood racks, sport RX, Expert Voice, etc. can’t put it on facebook because it is members only. Can we create a landing page without memberleap just for members?

 

    Item 7.  Sponsorship Details - Richard Duquette/Bicyclist

  • Susie - Richard gave us $5000 for a 2-year membership in past years.

    • New proposal

      • $6000 - $3000 would go directly to us. $3000 would be given to “Bicyclist” publication that puts out a magazine and has good digital presence.

      • $3000 allowance to advertise, do podcasts, do online advertising through them.

    • Action item: enter into contract with Richard Duquette to work with Bicyclist. Kevin makes a motion to approve, Ben seconds, unanimously approved.

    • Getting name out into magazine, $3000 of name branding. Will help with BWR and Rancho exposure

 

Item 8.  Potential partnership with Belgian Waffle Ride 2019

  • “BWR”

    • Rod Simmons has a long relationship with them, Victor Sheldon, Michael Marx - BWR promoter. Jay Isbell Gravel race well attended - 1200 in attendance

    • $200 ish to participate. Most people buy kits, gear, t shirts, travel around the world to come to ride

  • Want to do full MTB categories, can work out a structure to split income from that

  • Canyon is the title sponsor for the next few years

  • Potential agreements with BWR

    • Canyon will donate 4 bikes for promotional purposes

    • all the beer revenue for 3 days

    • Could offer a membership  - buying during the process and can work ongoing fundraiser for SDMBA into advertising

  • When they do events, they do email blasts they do not tell you the course but they are very entertaining and amusing.

  • All board members present open to a discussion about more - bring more volunteers to the race. Do it right one year and they will be very excited!

  • Volunteers and promotion will help. Mountain bike category event - training rides before. Interested in connections with property owners and looking at routes for the course.

  • Arch Ride/BWR dates

    • Arch - April 6th

    • May 5  - BWR. 2 days of expo and then the event - Friday-Sunday

  • Will give a lot amount of credit, could potentially get free entries

  • International competition

  • Arch Ride can be a training ride for BWR

 

Item 9.  Arch Ride 2019 proposal

  • Matt talked to Ed, we have a go ahead for half Arch ride.

    • Will be in Sundevil parking lot by high school at Black Mountain - will be a hard uphill at the start of the ride.

  • Half arch ride

    • just over 20 miles. 6.5 are black mountain including new trails, through Manzanita, Lilac, join up at Black Mountain aid station.

    • Susie - consider adding a 4th aid station in PQ? Ben - no, but maybe emergency services and water/food - small station

    • 20 mile ride would be good with a small aid station

    • Would sell at least another 250 riders and potentially get the whole facility at Green Flash to fill the entire space. More food stations, more stations, more booths.

    • Start time - 1.5 to 2 hours later than original start time

    • Potential to make another 20k than what we make currently

    • Do not have to increase county permit, no road crossings.

    • Aid station at black mountain will still be in place

  • Potentially allowing runners to go early?

 

Item 10.  Action Item: Adjustment in bookkeeper fees

  • $1000 donation of services for sponsorship listing

  • $1000 for back services

  • $500/month for remainder of 2018 (15 hrs/month)

  • Carol has invested over 70 hours of what she had originially been billed for to work on memberleap

    • $2000 of extra time to get books connected to memberleap, to get taxes automated

    • Has given us notice of 6-7 months that she wants to donate $1000 of services to platinum level

  • Al and Susie - Carol has done a lot of work, she did not let us know as far in advance as requested. Communication issue.

    • A lot of things to do to transition over, her work was undervalued.

  • Kevin - this person is donating a lot of her time and doing something that is working out for us.

    • Carol needs to communicate better, notify us of any other changes.

    • Will need to send us an invoice every month potentially with actual hours - Scott and Al. Getting quickbooks online, etc.

  • Susie - tried to make sure that Al and she are always together on communication

Action item: Kevin - makes a motion to pay Carol for bookkeeping services - increase amount for remainder of month, Ben seconds, unanimously approved

 
  • 1000 for in kind donation and put into sponsorship package as member

 

Item 11.  Action item:  timber bell reorder quantity 20 $200.00

Josh makes a motion to approve $200 for Timber bells, Don seconds. Unanimously approved.

 

Item 12. Action Item:  SDMBA Hat reorder quantity 24  $340.00

Kevin makes a motion to approve $340 for hates, Josh seconds, unanimously approved.

 

Item 13. Action item:  SDMBA Canari Jersey/apparel order $1000

  • Susie - Canari store is open and will remain open - can go on site to shop and go to Canari website to order.

  • Blue sdmba apparel in the last month has sold 1100 or 1200 of merch. Closed cycle out and will open again after the first round

  • Red Vip - at least 11 were ordered for VIP members

  • Susie ordered 1000 of blue apparel jerseys/shorts to sell at events

Action item: Matt makes a motion to approve $1000 for jerseys/apparel, Al seconds, unanimously approved.

 

Item 14. Action Item:  Budget for Mount Laguna Trail Fest expenses $12,000

  • Kevin and Susie -

    • Food, merchandise to sell and get money back, scavenger hunt items.

    • Signage to reuse, get items printed, port a potties, trash cans

Action item: Josh makes a motion to approve budget for Mount Laguna Trail Fest. Renee seconds. Unanimously approved.

 
  • Mount Laguna trails project - conversation with Lindsay.

    • Talk about project more generally.

    • Endurance runners offered 10,000 for new signage.

    • Forest service project, we are helping to restore trail.

 

Item 15. Action item: SDMBA Patches $500

  • Embroidered patches you can sew on

Action item: Ben makes a motion to approve $500 for SDMBA patches, matt seconds, unanimously approved.

 

 Updates - (Non Discussion Items)

  

Item 1.   Laguna Event Oct. 12-14, 2018 - four planning meetings held

Item 2.   

        

Items for next meeting Agenda

  1. Approval May 2018 Financials (from Consent Agena)

 

Board member communications

Item 1.  Upcoming events - 2-3 board members at each needed

  • June 30 Bike Giveaway at Zumwalt’s

    • 4 - 6 p.m. Saturday giving bike away at 5.

    • Pizza and beer, medium bike. Todd is providing food.

    • 10% given back to folks way say “I support SDMBA”.

  • July 13  Meet and Greet at CalBike La Jolla 5 -7 p.m.

    • Henty hydration pack

    • will provide wine beer and snacks

  • July 14 VIP Event “Ride with the President” Hodges 8 am - noon

    • vip members only

    • Not on the calendar. Sunset staging area.

 

Item 2. Advocacy meeting ideas:

  • 4 meetings offsite per year

  • If we schedule social rides/events a year in advance, we should get a good turnout

  • 4 offsite meetings would also be scheduled approximately a year in advance

    • 8 meetings per year, social rides additional

  • Approximately 20 people normally show up to advocacy meetings, things are getting somewhat state

    • July and December are difficult months to draw people

    • Quarterly

 

Adjournment

 

Meeting ends at 9:30 PM

 

Next Meeting:       August 2, 2018

 

Meeting Minutes Recorded by: Siobhan Baloochi, SDMBA Secretary