Minutes

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.