Winter Board Meeting

Last month, we had our first board meeting of the year! It was also the first official board meeting headed by our new President, (and West Texas AIA member), Dan Hart, and the first day of work for our new Executive Vice President, James Perry.  As you all well know, Tommy Cowen served as interim VP during the search for a permanent replacement for David Lancaster. David, as you recall, has moved on to working more intensively on the side of advocacy for TSA with our General Counsel Yvonne Castillo.

We had a relatively short list of items to discuss and vote on, but the meeting was pretty productive and informative.
State Issues:
Mary Crites gave a short talk concerning TAC, the number of chapters who met their goal for 2010, and the new goals for 2011. West Texas was one of the few chapters that did meet our TAC goal for 2010, and so that was good news. Larger chapters have a tendency to have less partcipation, as a percentage, with smaller donations per individual. There were several chapters..., however, that had 100% participation, very impressive. We have already received a substantial contribution from one member, so odds are, we will make our goal again this year, but it would be nice if we could improve our participation numbers. (Chris is planning on having a TAC representative visit our chapter and give a talk about what exactly TAC is, and why it is so important to our profession and organization:)
National Issues:
Regional Director, Bill Reeves, FAIA, presented a resolution concerning international AIA members, and what name they would be allowed to use. Currently, international members not licensed in the USA are classified associate members. They are opposed to this designation since it does not represent their professional standing. The resolution would have supported the use of AIA by these members when followed by the name of their international chapter, and only outside of the USA. For example, Joe Jones, AIA-England. The resolution did not pass, however, and no alternate was pursued.