Attendees
Christian DeCelle
Sean Vanderhoff
Josh Brewer
Christopher Morris
John Cassidy
Benjamin Tobin
Preston Forsythe
Amber Yuellig
Barry Adams
Melissa Lawrence-Forst
Meeting called to order by Josh Brewer at 7:02 pm on November 20, 2019.
Announcements
- Howard is currently in flight so Josh is leading the meeting.
Previous Minutes
- Amber read the minutes as she joined the meeting. She will get them typed up and out for the website and board soon.
- Sean moved to approve the minutes, Sarah seconded. They passed unanimously.
Treasurer Report
- Beginning balance was $15,546.19
- Ending balance was $15,765.51
- This month money was spent mainly on the annual meeting, with $590.38 brought in with new membership and $796.40 brought in for search fees.
- Continued to discuss a credit card for the KSS for making purchases easier instead of having to wait on John to send our checks. John thinks it is a good idea to streamline and make things easier. Will table a vote for the board for next meeting. Josh agrees that we should get a credit card. Benjamin Tobin also agrees.
- The IRS website claims that we are a non-profit, which is great news.
- John also brought up putting $5000 into a stock mutual fund this coming week. He noted that we could put another $5000 into a bond fund, that is safer but still brings us something for our money. We shouldn’t need more than the $5000 that would be left in the account.
Committee Reports
- Data Access Report
- We have had 9 requests in the last month! That is 67 requests for the year so far.
- 6 were non-commercial
- 1 academic
- 5 landowner/caves
- 3 commercial requests
- Sarah noted the TVA request and noted that we had a meeting last week to discuss that request
- Sarah also discussed the change to Microsoft Access and noted some of the thoughts that the Data Committees had on this
- Data Archives Report
- Interns have scanned all the large format cave maps
- They are tagged with key words but are not yet on dropbox
- Emergency Response Committee
- No update as Mike was not in attendance as he was out on call tonight
- Membership Committee
- Had 1 member renew early this month
- 85 members right now
- He needs to send out some annual renewals
- Sean is working on adding all the emails to the membership spreadsheet for creating the membership area website
- Sean is working on doing quarterly newsletters to the membership
- Will choose 3 websites that create these and will bring it to the board
- Grant Committee
- No update from Amber
Annual Report
- Josh updated us on the status of the Annual Report and noted that a lot of the articles have already been put together in the program.
- We really need cave maps submitted.
- Josh called out again that we need the county coordinators to submit their snapshots.
- Josh stated that Chris has picked up some new skills for InDesign to make it easier.
- Sheila has been reading and doing a great job of editing the articles.
KSS Survey Initiative
- Campbell Cave - Christian County will be started on December 8th.
- California Cave - Estill County will be continued this coming weekend.
- Gilmore, Blowing Springs, Cave Springs and Flippin Cave - Green/Taylor Counties will be next year with Kimbro Pitman and Steve Gentry.
- Cindy Cave - Dale Hollow SRP will need one more weekend to finish the map and cave
- Wells Cave - Pulaski County will continue with Amber leading the way
Annual Meeting
- Tentative date is September 19-20th, 2020
- The meeting will be on the Sunday
Old Business
- Regional Coordinators
- Thinking about combining all the database committees
- With Sarah leading the archives and Howard leading the database aspects
- Jim Quinlans
- Nothing going on with this
- There is a partial collection at UK
- Ben has it on his list to figure out where that existing collection is
- Interns
- Ben said that we are started this with other funding.
- The goal is to get our backlog caught up
- We need to get our goals straightened out and get it ready for next semester
- The current interns are moving through the data quicker than they can give them stuff to do
- Josh said that we have pledged something around $3500 for the interns
New Business
- Membership List on Website
- Yahoo Groups is going away so we are going to email through our website
- Will start after the Annual is put out
- Sean is working on the list as noted above
Future Work
- We want to update our election bylaws
- Advisory Board
- Where we can have past board members, friends from around the state will be on a board of specialists.
- Jim Currens and Ben Miller have agreed to be on this
- Bio Data on the Survey 123 and in the database
- The app is going to be remade on the KSS account instead of Howard’s
- Josh noted that the app has been incredibly useful
Other News
- Sarah noted that Estill County Survey Initiative is this coming weekend
- Going to ridgewalk some properties and check out a cave that a landowner had told Sarah about
- Camping at Barb’s house/guest house
- Meeting at 10 am EST at the Hardees in Irvin both Saturday and Sunday
- Preston noted that Estill was the 4th largest guana mining county in the state
- Josh noted that the annual will be full color this year!
Josh motioned to end the meeting at 7:50, Amber seconded. Meeting ended.