Minutes

Kentucky Speleological Survey

January 15, 2020

 

Attendees: 

Howard Kalnitz, Amber Yuellig, Chris Morris, Josh Brewer, Ben Tobin, Barry Adams, Shelia Minor, Sean Vanderhoff, John Cassidy, Sarah Arpin

 

Announcements: 

  • Howard and Pat Kambesis will be teaching cave survey/ cartography 6/14-19 as a part of the Mammoth Cave Field Studies program

 

Previous Minutes: Amber Yuellig

  • In addition to the minutes, John Cassidy supplied fiscal data for the past 3 years via email
  • Budget for the upcoming year passed via email
    • For: HK, AY, JC, JB, SV
    • Abstain: BT, SA
    • Against:
  • Minutes approved

 

Treasurer: John Cassidy

  • $16,067.71 start
  • -$4000 for the interns to UK/ KGS
  • -$17.95 website
  • +$150 search fees
  • +$343.72 membership
  • $12,543.72 ending 

 

  • Meeting with a bank on Saturday to pick up credit card and will look at their investments
    • KSS Name is on card
    • Chair and Treasurer will have cards
  • Meeting with Fidelity next week- suggest investing $5,000
  • There are few outstanding invoices, suggest penalty after three months unpaid
  • Howard motions to move $3,000 to two mutual fund accounts with Fidelity
    • Motion passes
  • Sarah: are we setting up online banking or is this something we have?
    • John: we have online banking as well as PayPal, we will have online access to Fidelity

 

Committee Reports

  1. Data Access: Sarah Arpin
    • Tentative data meeting 1/22
    • Sarah met with an expert at UK and has lots of input
    • 3 commercial requests so far for 2020, +$500 billable
    • Creating auto-populated billing
    • Also working on how all committees will function with each other
  2. Database
    • See data access
    • ArcGIS bill $9,000- forgot grant, ESRI will adjust to $200
    • Questions raised: do we know how long this grant lasts? Howard will look into this
  3. Data Archive
    • See A and B
    • Sarah Arpin checking student work
  4. Membership: Sean Vanderhoff
    • Extracted names from Yahoo
    • 8 new members (7 yearly, 1 life)
    • Considering Mail Chimp and looking at other software for communication to replace Yahoo
  5. Grant: Amber Yuellig
    • Do we need a deadline
    • Considering a rolling deadline for the survey grant and arbitrary deadline for academic
  6. Annual Report: Chris Morris
    • Finalizing edit (Shelia, Josh, Chris)
    • Getting quotes from printers
    • Hopefully sending to the printer next week
  7. Advisory Committee Setup- Howard and Ben
    • No update
  8. KSS Survey Initiative- Josh
    • Green/ Taylor counties- Kimbro
    • Wells- Amber
      1. Unknown total, notes were passed to Bob Roth and never passed on
    • California- Ben Tobin- 1200 feet
    • Campbell Cave- Preston
      1. 6-7 trips, 3700 feet, 9 leads
      2. Next trip 1/25-26, a private chat group has been set up for interested surveyors
      3. 3000 feet from Flemming Cave may tie in

 

Annual Meeting- Josh

  • Transitioning to Sean’s leadership, Josh will assist
  • Considering Louisville area but open to recommendations that would be central for cavers around the state

 

Old Business

  • Regional coordinators- no update
  • Interns- Ben
    • Start next week cataloging, data meeting 1/22 will set focus and goals
  • Yahoo- Chris still looking at email options
  • June 28, tentative face to face meeting at KGS

 

New Business

  1. Budget Justification- per Ben’s email, we should write justification to explain the budget role
  2. File storage- Chris
    1. Dropbox may not be the most effective/ cost-effective any more
    2. Looking at Google Drive for non-profit
  3. Back to Annual Report
    1. USPS has non-profit status mailings, could save $
    2. Need to include “return service requested”

 

Meeting Adjourn 8:38 pm

 

Next Meeting 2/22 Data, 2/19 board