Present: Paul (minutes), Cory, Russ, Hannah, Tiff, Stormie (facilitator), Fred, Dwain, Frog, Ivy, Beryl, Graham, Kate, Jennifer, Leo
No one for meet & greet.
Minutes approved.
None.
(Treasurer) Vote on a budget option
Stormie: Please refer to the handouts with different options. There’s a budget that increases the house reserves. There’s another option that increases the food budget from $400/mo to $600. There’s a third budget that increases the food budget to $800. These are the plans that Len and I came up with.
Leah: Rounding up to a $32 increase means we could add maybe $150 to food budget and keep everything else for our operating reserves. I think we should round rent to nearest dollar, not the other budgets. Lyssa says we don’t need to increase the food budget if we keep using it like we do. We don’t fully understand how many reserves we need and I want to be cautious about that.
Dwain: Will the rent go up again later this year?
Point of Information: No.
Paul: I’m all for increasing the food budget. Sasona has 4x as much spending per person.
Russ: We don’t have to spend the entire food budget. We can send other money to the reserve.
Stormie: We also need to have a budget for office supplies and cleaning supplies and other regular purchases.
Cory: It’s also going to be a 10-month budget by the time we’re ready to implement rent changes. That adds about another $11 per room. We’ll need to restructure the budgets based on that.
Stormie: Len was not aware of the 10-month budget requirement.
Leah: I want to see padding on the budget used for the unknown reserves problem. And it sounds like we don’t have the numbers we need to vote on.
Russ: We can just add in the $11 padding Cory was talking about.
Leah: Then we’ll be overpaying next year’s rent.
Kate: We did a 10-month budget last year too.
Cory: The first page comes out to $39/mo increase, the CHEA budget. The options for food budget are $34/mo, $40, and $46 rent increases. The first option already accounted for line item reserves, that’s why it’s cheaper than the CHEA budget. But maybe it should be percentages … $43/mo for the middle option, a food budget of $600.
Cory: If I put 2.3% of our budget for reserves with a $600/mo food budget, that comes out to a $42/mo increase, bringing the rent to $550/room. That also accounts for our “10-month cycle.”
Approved unanimously.
Please return your ballots for Roberto staying on the board as a community board rep. There’s another slot for community board representative. Just report it to the board to nominate people.
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Concerns are expressed about FNB using co-op food when they are supposed to bring in their own food.