Lake Washington Association Board Meeting April 7, 2015
Board Members Present:
| Ken Klehr Mike Wosmek Sandy Wosmek Lyle Walker | Cathy Klehr Pat Hanson Tom Hauer Ron Bubany | Skip Sustacek Steve Grotbo Rick Fernstrom Steve Ullom |
Board Members please let someone know if you are not able to attend.
Treasurer Report: Invasive Species Fund $35,588; General Fund
PAID MEMBERSHIPS:
1) Call Meeting to order 7 PM – by President Ken Klehr.
2) Secretary’s March Board Meeting Report – approved for publication on the website.
3) Treasurer’s (Oct-March Financial Report) – Lyle reviewed financials from October 2014 thru March 2015. Some of the major expenses paid out were $13,000 for the watershed project, $1200 for insurance; $1775 to Dassel Fire Dept. is a pass through from members’ donations. Some significant income was $8,000 watershed grant, $2000 from Meeker County Associations of Lakes for water testing. Lyle looked at printing and mailing costs for the newsletters, previous to the new newsletter format the costs were about $500 and with the new one it is trending around $680. It was noted that we are getting about $440 in advertising. As a group the Board is pleased with the new format for the newsletter.
Piehl, Hanson, Beckman will be doing our year end report and file necessary paperwork for LWIA.
4) Shoreline Captains/Membership Committee Update – Cathy plans on scheduling a Shoreline Captains meeting for the Saturday of Memorial weekend.
5) Cormorants & Pelicans Committee Status – Rick is working on scheduling a meeting with Lee Sundmark to look at the fish survey from 2014. He has reports of many birds on Pigeon Lake. He would like to ask the DNR what the costs are for cleaning up the dead birds from last year. The U M hasn’t given out any new bird number reports from 2014.
6) Membership Survey Committee Report – The second article will be in the Spring Newsletter.
7) Website & Facebook Activity – Steve G. reported we have 68 people on Facebook. We are averaging about 3 hits per day. We have had 97 hits in the last 30 days, with the majority being new users. Steve asked to get the ice out dates for 2014 and 2015 to update our web page.
8) Invasive Species Committee Update – The committee will be going out starting in May. We have gotten a grant from the State for $7100 with the total cost of treatments estimated at about $14000 to treat 70 acres.
9) Watershed Committee Report – Skip reported Lindgren Construction will be doing some touch up on areas around the holding pond. Lindgren will also be doing the updates to the tile outlets on the Ahlgren farm. Scott put up 4 wood duck houses and some evergreens. Skip and Ken will be meeting with Joe from Meeker County Water and Soil to look at other problem areas around Lake Washington.
10) Watercraft Inspection Committee – Tom H. applied to the DNR for a boat inspection grant for 2014, but Lake Washington was not awarded a grant. Tom has a call into Wendy at the State DNR to find out what we need to do to get a grant for boat inspections. It was noted that last year the DNR did send out someone on a very part time basis to do boat inspections at Ellsworth landing.
11) Communications & Public Relations – Post a notice in the newsletter that we need a new board member to serve out the final two years of a term.
12) Spring Newsletter – Ron B, Cathy K, and Tom H met with Crow River Printing about printing, mailing and including membership cards with envelopes for the Spring Newsletter. Ron reported they will be sending out the Newsletter by April 17.
13) Board Members with Term Expiring 2015
Cathy Klehr / Skip Sustacek / Lyle Walker
Steve Ullom / Mike & Sandy Wosmek / Replacement for Mary Braaten
14) Water Quality Testing Review – Ken K. proposed we change our water quality testing procedures: testing water on only 2 of 5 sites: monthly May through September; testing water for phosphorus, chlorophyll, temperature; with 2 secchi disk readings per month at all 5 sites. With this information we should be able to come up with a Tropic State Index, using the Carlson Tropic State Index criteria. This would reduce the costs of water quality sampling and reporting that was projected to be $3600 for 2015. Ken proposed sending the water samples to RMB testing in Alexandria. They are a state certified testing site. We would be able to access the test results as soon as they are completed and RMB would issue a year end report and send results to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. It was pointed out we would be able to check the sample results on a more timely basis.
The cost for testing is $42.00 per sample with 10 samples tested over the course of the summer at a cost of $420 total. We will need to ship the water samples to RMB, Ken thought we have 48 hours to get the samples there. He estimated it would take about a total of 25 hours to complete this process over the summer. Ken K. has signed up with the Citizen Lake Monitoring Program to do the water sampling and secchi readings every month. He has one other person that has volunteered to assist him and Skip S. volunteered to help. The board approved this plan for doing water quality testing.
15) Annual Meeting: May 2nd 2015 –
Pork Chops are ordered and B & B Sports of Hutchinson is paying for them.
Program – Will not have outside speaker.
4PM Set-up
Pork chops being delivered 3-3:30 may need some help cooking them.
5PM Social
6PM Pork Chop Dinner
6:30PM Program (Committee Reports, Board Member Elections)
8PM Clean-up
We have ordered 3 meat trays to raffle off.
16) 2015 Budget (May 1, 2015 to April 31, 2016) – Lyle reviewed the May 1, 2015 – April 30, 2016 income and expenses based on historical data such as: 220 members, state grants for treatment of milfoil, there was a discussion about water craft inspection costs and if we can get money from other sources we would like to do this. His projections have income exceeding expenses by $1200.
17) Open Discussion
Next Board meeting Tuesday, May 5th @ 7 PM. Dassel Rod & Gun Club