Written by David Robertson

The minutes of the March 8th and 9th meeting was moved for acceptance.
M/S/C

Initial planning is getting underway for the 40th annual CUPE 1767 AGM. This should be our best ever and hope there is great interest in attending this event on September 27th & 28th. I will be sending out the call to convention soon with more of the details.

As the year progresses so to does the balances of the budget accounts. Most line items are trending as expected with the exception of Legal/Grievance. We have only expended 6.77% of the budgeted amount, which either speaks to the great work of the grievance committee or the managers. I’m thinking the committee is doing a great job. As we take advantage of the many conferences and training seminars it appears we will exceed the Conventions and Seminars line item. Overall we are on track to being on budget.

We will again talk about a couple of risk items this weekend to see where we can improve the efficiency and functionality of our local. The discussions from the last meeting were much more in depth then I was expecting and so far this looks to be a very good process. Currently we are in the process of writing up a couple of Constitutional Amendments and Policy Resolutions for the AGM that will help address potential turnover of Table officers and help mitigate information silos within our local. There will be a full report at this years’ AGM.

I recently attended the orientation breakfast this past week along with Kevin and Jared. It was well attended and initial responses were positive. My overall message to members is to know your rights within our Collective Agreement as if you don’t know… you don’t know. On occasion we should all take the time to read through this important guiding document.

The Trustees met to review our books on April 14th. Both Paul and Cathy reviewed the books with the result that our books are in good shape. I tasked them this time to look at their process to ensure that they are doing a thorough job and with the expectation that at the end of the day they can honestly say ‘there is no funny business going on’. I also wanted them to look for inefficiencies within our local, which they have a couple of suggestions that are found in their report. The one that can be helped by all of our members is when we attend regional meetings and the AGM to ensure we are using the most efficient and cost effective transportation that we can. Car-pooling where several members are coming from the same area is a great way to keep our costs low.

We have revised the expense claim and will be presenting it to the executive for approval this weekend. The main addition is creating individual claim # for each claim. This consists of the date of the expense followed by the initials of the person submitting the claim. The claim # can then be written on receipts and referenced in emails and will considerably improve the expense claim process. In addition we have been switching to using Telpay for expense claims for our board rather then cheques. This is a much more automated process and has been working well.

We are just finishing up the personal grievances in the scanning project. We gave Kevin one of the portable hard drives with the information that we have completed and so far it appears it works as we had hoped. Thanks to Abagail for working on such a tedious task for such a long period.

Donna Murray from our Prince George Office will be attending this weekend’s Executive meeting as our guest. As members become more familiar with this opportunity I have seen the interest in attending our meeting also increase. This is a great way to learn about the going on’s within our local as well as having direct input on topics as an attendee. If you are interested in attending please keep an eye out for my expression of interest that I send out via email (make sure your rep has your personal email).
M/S/C

Latest Reports