Any Alternitaves to AMA???
Easytiger,
Even if Marc is off on his #'s a bit, his points do have alot of merit. A non-profit company should be liable to provide budget information, especially in the modern age of electronic forms and online databases. It's not as if they would have to employ 3 people with typewriters and accounting journals writing things out by hand. We do not need a line-by-line per person accounting of salary, but even a simple total amount of salary and employees would suffice. I think something that should be line by line (at least by employee/officer) would be travel budget. How much of the annual budget do these expenses incur, and is there a drastic change of amounts per district, and why? Same thing with newsletters and mailings. Are the AMA election flyers paid for by the candidate, the AMA, or partially both? How much money is paid out to the lobbyists that "present our intrests to politicians and the government? Do we provide campaign contributions, and if so, to who and how much? These are viable questions. If we are in such an age of information being so easily accessible by online or electronic methods, why do we need newsletters? You can mail to those who specifically ask/request it. I have only gotten one piece of AMA literature other than the magazine, and that is the renewal form/membership card/sticker set. I think the magazine should be an optional item as well. I know the "captive audience" of 150-200k active "subscribers" would be cut severely, which as Marc said, would greatly impact the revenue generated from advertising rates. Those pretty color pages do cost alot of money to print.
It seems as if the AMA went from being an organization to a business, and that comes at the members' expense. The "business" needs a flashy new building and a place to showcase the "organization", so the "business decrees it necessary for the good of the "organization" to have this building, and voila, money that could have been spent elsewhere was poured into the Muncie, IN local economy. I'm sure the facility is nice, but it should be for what was spent. Will I ever go there? Probably not unless I decide to compete and end up at a Nationals.For myself, and alot of other members, Muncie, IN is not a vacation hotspot. Should we have spent the money elsewhere? I'm sure it could have done alot of clubs/fields alot of good. They must have figured that since this would be the only shot at getting a new facility, they were gonna go balls to the wall. Its easier to get it now, than ask for it later after the budget is used up. Look at the latest batch of sports teams moving, or threatening to move if they dont get that pretty new state of the art stadium, so they can cram more people into the seats at a higher ticket price. Who pays for it, the taxpayers get stuck twice, once for the building, and then again for the privelidge of sitting in a seat for a few hours. Seems like this is a somewhat similar endeavor.
That is the one downside of a "grass-roots" organization. As the grass grows, the roots sink deeper to keep the grass fed. When the grass uses up its resources, it either needs fertilizer (more $$$), or it dies back and adjusts. If it doesnt get the fertilizer, it will turn brown, dwindle back, and eventually die. Then youre left with a dead patch of grass, an unemployed landscaper, and a bunch of ticked off people complainin about the dead grass.
Two more cents worth on the table,
Steve