Urgent - Amended Budget Proposal (Cancelling Operational Summit)

[Brendan]

Hello everyone

The budget is a "living document" and there was a lot of uncertainty this year. We need to adapt as new information comes to light.

I was privately hoping that we'd pay for the arborist report and then be able to either open or close various sections of the forest without having to spend too much money on tree work. The additional $30k for tree work really threw a spanner in the works. As you know, this wiped out any contingency that we had for the unexpected and left us eating into our cash reserves to an uncomfortable extent. Knowing what I know now I would probably have pushed for a slightly higher ticket price.

I think that it's vital to continue to build up cash in the bank (or at least not go backwards). This is my expert opinion as your finance person and I can go into a lot more detail about this if anyone wants me to.

Now one of our shipping containers is kaput. The roof was badly rusted and the tree falling on it finished it off. Chris has volunteered to take a look once he's on site to see if he can work some welding magic to make it serviceable again. In the meantime, it looks like that new shipping container is back on the cards for this year after all (at a cost approaching $5k including delivery). This could be squeezed into existing budget allocations if necessary but I'd like to propose an alternative.

I suggest that we cancel the Operations Summit this year and re-visit next year. This is disappointing because I believe in the value of the additional summit but cancelling would free up quite a lot of cash.

I've put together an updated budget which includes finalised costs of several items (insurance, medics, security, etc, etc). There are a couple of items that I'm still checking (vehicle rental costs) but I'm reasonably comfortable with where I ended up and didn't want to delay any further.

I've attached an updated (proposed) budget which includes the following material changes:

* Confirmed various costs.

* Increased ticket sales by 40

* Removed operational summit

* Added new / replacement shipping container

* Increased "miscellaneous" category to allow for a healthy operational contingency (previous versions had the contingency come out of any cash surplus, prior to the tree work eliminating said surplus)

* Included crew ticket pricing

* Crew training allocation dropped by $2k due to site safe credit and lower than expected cost for media training

Disclaimer: there may be other changes not listed above so please review the spreadsheet.

Net result: No operational summit in exchange for a new shipping container, healthy contigency buffer, and breaking even on net cash surplus.

Given the timing, I expect this to be the final formal proposal to make changes to the budget (I may have said something like that last time).

-Brendan

[Wendy]

I know this isn't formally listed as a volunteer but I say yes.

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[Wendy]

Oh ffs phone, vote. I said vote.

[Rainbow Ronan]

is the summit and the renting of the lodge not part of our contractual obligations?

[Wendy]

That's the excom summit. The one that is being proposed to drop was a second summit for ops teams.

[Rainbow Ronan]

ahhhh I see. sorry early morning brain

[Brendan]

It's a pretty significant change. We can have a formal vote to adopt it if you think it's appropriate.

[Wendy]

I suspect a formal vote might take too long.  We can try an emergency one without the usual 'everyone votes, one week' caveat.

I'll put that up now.

On 9 January 2017 at 09:52, Brendan <introvert...@gmail.com> wrote:

It's a pretty significant change. We can have a formal vote to adopt it if you think it's appropriate.

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[ben curran]

I'm fine with this if/when a vote comes up. 

[Brendan]

I've said to go ahead with the container purchase anyway as Ops can work it into the existing budget allocations if strictly necessary (ie if this vote doesn't pass).