Just a reminder and a couple of changes of policy from me this week:

First the reminder is that you must have all of your work hours registered in the Job Jar by the end of January.  We will begin billing people in February and unless you have made arrangements for an exemption from me (for serious cause) by the end of the month you will receive a bill from the office that you will be expected to pay.

First policy change:  we will begin doing spot audits of the hours in the Job Jar this year.  It has come to light that some people may not actually be doing the hours they are claiming.  If this is true it is completely unacceptable and we will take measures to make sure it doesn't happen again this year.

Mark and I used to do the minimum number of hours of work at the Club.  We are always involved in volunteer work elsewhere and we never really thought about how much work is actually done by volunteers at ABYC.  Well, my stint on the board has clarified things for me and I can assure you that without the incredible number of hours of work done by some members of the club (who receive NO advantage for doing the time) our club costs would be astronomical.  We have lots of members who do literally hundreds of hours of work for us all, for free, year after year.  And these are people who don't just sign up and then stand around, they are the ones who get in and do the work.  The 20-hour work-or-pay standard is low given how many hours are needed to run this place so please take your volunteer responsibilities seriously, it makes a big difference to us all.

Finally, we will be locking the buildings when the staff leaves from now on.  There was an incident recently where the outside door to the men's washroom was left open for a number of hours overnight (someone had come in to use the facilities in the middle of the night and had failed to ensure the door was properly closed) and we had damage due to freezing.  There should be no reason for anyone to be using our facilities overnight during the winter so the keypad entry system will be disabled overnight until we get closer to launch.  The same will apply to access to Casa Ballman.