Dear Tarasdad,
Welcome to our discussion, and welcome back to modeling. When I ran in last year’s District X Election I had three key issues, field acquisition and retention, improving District X’s use of the internet to serve our members, and my long term goal of obtaining an AMA West flying site. These continue to be my top priorities.
I listed site acquisition and retention as number 1 because without it we have nothing. My ideas about helping clubs in this area revolve around being proactive. I believe the most important Officer in a club is not the President or Treasurer, but the Community Relations Officer. If your club doesn’t have one you should seriously consider electing one. This position would be responsible for your clubs dealings with your neighbors and if you’re on public land the entity that controls it or on private land your landlord.
This puts one name and number in place for your neighbors to contact if they have concerns. This person could organize your Community Appreciation day. One club in District X the Livermore Flying Electrons goes around the surrounding neighborhood knocking on doors and leaving fliers inviting their neighbors to join them at their field. While there they serve a free lunch and provide demonstrations as well as opportunities to try flying on a buddy box and simulators. The LFE’s have reported to me the great success they’ve had because they got out knocked on doors and made the first move to introduce themselves.
The Community Relations Officer would issue press releases to alert your news outlets of the positive actions your club has accomplished and events the public can attend. Recently the Trabuco RC Flyers in Orange County California had a community day and it was covered both before the event and after the event by the Orange County Register. This is a Pulitzer Prize winning newspaper that is one of the most significant in Southern California. The reason they were covered was because they made it a priority and they kept in constant contact with a reporter at the paper, their hard work paid off.
Perhaps the most important thing your Community Relations Officer would do is maintain the club’s relationship with your public officials that control your land or a landlord on private land. Today is Election Day. In many parts of our District the Decision makers that control your field are up for election. Club can do several things to take advantage of the opportunities that this presents. Many times we feel that the only thing that we can offer a candidate is money, while it is true that money talks we also have a valuable resource, manpower. Running a local campaign takes a lot of volunteer manpower and we should be aligning ourselves with candidates that are friendly to our cause and help elect them. They need people to put up signs, go door to door asking for votes and leaving literature and manning phone banks calling voters and selling the candidate. If your club can deliver that kind of help the Official will remember it and take your call when you need to talk to them and be sympathetic to you when others raise issues about your field.
Many clubs run fund raisers, why not choose a charity that is important to your public officials or landlord and involve them in the pictures and press releases detailing the money raised or help provided. If we are going to help our community we should double up by selecting a beneficiary that our field’s decision makers support.
Simply find out the Birthdays of these decision makers and acknowledge them with a card from the club.
I have a lot of ideas in this area and it is one of the reasons I want to move event coverage from our column in the magazine to the internet and use that space to discuss the techniques that clubs have found successful to protect their fields.
I support a west coast flying site because as AMA members we deserve a place we can gather to compete and share in our fellowship and love of our sport. Currently the District X members send $1,500,000 per year in dues to Muncie, of that amount less than $20,000 is returned for direct use in our District. You asked how we could fund it; it looks to me like we already are raising a good amount of money now. This is a good time to make an investment in a capital asset that will appreciate over time and bring a tremendous benefit to our members.
Finally I want to touch on the FAA rulemaking that has the potential to affect our sport. This is a critical time for modelers; we need to marshal all of our assets to respond to the upcoming FAA Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM). As an Aeronautical Engineer a significant part of my job is responding to NPRM’s, we need to be prepared to demonstrate to the FAA that any alternate rules we proposed will provide the same or higher level of safety than the wording in the NPRM. I do not believe the FAA has any desire to harm modeling, in fact I’m sure a higher than average percentage of FAA staff have been or are modelers themselves, but we need to be ready to respond.
If you would like to learn more about me please see my [link=http://ama-district-x-election.blogspot.com/]website[/link].
Sincerely
Lawrence Tougas
Candidate for AMA District X Vice-President
http://ama-district-x-election.blogspot.com/