January 20, 2009 KSDP Board Meeting Minutes

Posted on: February 26th, 2009 | Author: General Manager | Filed under: Minutes


Sand Point Library Conference Room

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

7:00 P.M.

MEETING MINUTES

Call to Order

The meeting was called to order at 7:40 p.m. by Chairman Robbe Gilmour.

Roll Call

Board members present: Chairman, Robbe Gilmour; Vice President, Justin Godbehere; Secretary / Treasurer, Marta Varga and Board member, Joanna Karlsen

Board members not present: Chairman Emeritus, Jim Brown

KSDP staff present: General Manager, Kells Hetherington; Music Director, Virgil Porter; Administrative Assistant, Shannon Sommer

Approval of Agenda

Justin Godbehere moved to approve the agenda. Marta Varga seconded the motion.

Approval of Minutes

Justin Godbehere moved to approve the minutes. Marta Varga seconded the motion.

Report from the General Manager

Since the last Board meeting, a great deal has transpired at your radio station.

Looking at our financial statements, you can see the station has raised money from several outside sources. In the quarter just ended, we received twenty-five hundred dollars from the National Ad Council through an advertising agency and sign up Wells Fargo National Bank as an underwriter just to highlight two examples. The station also received a payment from the State of Alaska as part of its state operating grant.  Let me go into some more details concerning several proposed projects.

The station  has several outstanding grant applications requesting funds for proposed special projects. The station has a grant application applied for $25,000  to Rasmusen Foundation in Anchorage. The funds will allow the radio station to do its proposed studio renovation and add the SIP dish outside the City Building.

The station’s proposed purchase and installation of a wind turbine is the subject of two outstanding grant applications. One is to the Alaska Capital Grants Program and the other is to the State Energy Authority (AEA). Alaska Public Broadcasting responded to the first stating that they will consider our application based on the response that we get from the State Energy Authority. They’re not saying “no” or “yes;” but “We want to hear what the State Energy Authority says, before we committ ourselves to any finacnail assitance.”

Additionally, the radio station has been in communication with the State Representative Bryce Edgmon’s office about a capital grant for the radio station being inserted  the state budget. Edgmon’s office knows we want to improve our weak signal in King Cove and his staff will be back in touch with me about how we need to go about making this request.

At the last Board meeting, accounting was discussed and I said that we had retained Foster & Company to assist the station on a regular basis. This arrangement has not worked out as planned and the Board wanted to further review it. When I say, the situation has not worked out as planned, I mean that having QuickBooks online has been an excellent thing.  This enables both Shannon and me to access this information simultaneously.

Robbe: What’s the cost of that?

Kells: The cost of QuickBooks will be no more than twenty dollars per month.

Robbe: What’s Foster & Company get out of that?

Kells: Doing the annual audit will be easier for Foster & Company with the benefit of Quickbooks online and it will make easier for doing reporting work for the station.

Robbe: What are they going to do reports on? Also, the sixty eight hundred dollars refers to the annual audit and is not included in general accounting expenses?  I don’t understand.  Why is that?

Kells: The expense of the annual audit and the cost of our ongoing accounting needs  and accounted for separately in the budget.  The reports Foster & Co do are for the state and required by the Department of Administration in order for the station to receive its operating grant from the state.  Does that explain it?

ROBBE: Okay, so I would still like a breakdown of what your accounting costs are.

Kells: Okay.

Programming is coming along in all sorts of directions, and the website is coming along very nicely. The web address is www.apradio.org. We still hold the others: www.ksdpradio.com, www.alaskapublicbroadcasting.com, www.alaskapublicbroadcasting.org, they all hold to one. Alaska Public Broadcasting.com is our FTP web address and used to archive programs such as meet the People. You can find what’s going on at the station and what’s coming up programing wise or you can listen to the station live. I think the most major development is an internet issue that arose, last week? And we figured out the Cisco router is not, quote UN quote, “not the best” its half the network. It’s this it the big black box in the main area. The Cisco router has a lot of functionalities that are not being utilized right now. It’s worth looking at this further and taking this into the production area and on air studio and making everything come into one router. That will require a visit from an engineer and significant cost.

Justin: How much?

Kells: I think about five thousand dollars.

Justin: And the reason to do that would be?

Kells: Well, it would allow us to use what is, to fully use the piece of forty-thousand dollar equipment that might make the internet faster. It would simplify the network which would help keep things from crashing and help organize things.

Robbe: There’s a twenty five thousand dollar grant out there, would like to use the money for services from the Rasnuson foundation, upgrades and King Cove’s FM signal.

Kells: That could be, if they come back and say we will provide you with the money we would probably, not a 100%, probably can we amend this application like this. If we get offered the money, we should take it up with them.

King Cove will join the Sand Point internship program. The students there are working with Dana Rajurio who is a teacher in King Cove and we had a satellite phone conversation with them where we could see them on television and they are going to upload to a DFTP site  Virgil. This will allow students in King Cove to put together a program just like the students in Sand Point. It will be broadcast on the radio each week.

We also have an pizza bake sale idea. We would like to have a pizza bake sale and to use the school ovens and to sell pizzas to the people in the community. Our idea, Virgil and I have talked about this, Jim and I have talked about this also, that try to fix fifty pizzas deliver them in the course of a couple hours.

Marta: Do you have materials?

Kells: We would like to make the pizzas from scratch.

Virgil: Basically the whole thing, they’ve got the dough mixers, ovens. The sauce we might go canned.

Kells: Jim said it sounded like a lot of work, he thought it should be something discussed by the entire board before we went off on this project, so we are asking for your advice and council to say, “alright we are giving you our stamp of approval on this idea.”

Marta: My input on this is to wait until the students are done with their sale for the Washington D.C. trip.

Joanna: What is the money for?

Kells: General operating expenses.

Joanna: I would wait for the fundraising for the trip to be over.

Robbe: Maybe help the class, KSDP volunteering to help the class. I think it’s a good idea.

Kells: Alright we will put our efforts behind the class.

We broadcasted our first basketball game. If you heard it, it needs some work, it’s not perfect by any means but it’s a start. Virgil and I worked very hard to get it set up so we could actually get a live broadcast.

Virgil: It’s a start. We could switch back and forth with Lauren and our internet feed.

Old Business

Robbe: Old business, update on Capital Grant.

Kells: That was the capital grant that we discussed from Bryce Edgmons office.

Robbe: We reviewed the checks. Justin, do you have any questions, I asked all mine. King Cove student interns, we discussed that.

Kells: We are using Virgil’s computer expertise and we are leveraging that.

Virgil: By the time fishing ends, we can update our live feed. The King cove students will be doing the same as Sand Point students, half hour radio shows.

Kells: That will save roughly four thousand dollars a year. We are still going to have to pay fro streaming at least for a while, it will get better. We also have a lot of local programming going on. Like tomorrow, we have Della Trumble from King Cove. She’s going to be talking about the King Cove / Cold Bay proposed road. (Talking about the guy who you interviewed who didn’t think you were right about the road). We are also co-hosting, Virgil and I afternoon news.

New Business

Public Comments & Discussion

Joanna: I’ve been enjoying what I’ve been hearing on the radio, vast improvement what we were hearing last year.

Robbe: Look for happy news; no one wants to listen to sad news. Try to find the good.

Virgil: Tour of the new water facility, used the wrong mic for the Moranzt box, will do it again.

Kells: like Robbe said, put together a Paul Harvey show. Listening to his idea is an excellent once, and post it on the .pft site. We are going to try to connect state blogs onto our site so we are able to know what’s on out there.

Next Meeting

The next meeting is Thursday, February 12, 2008 at 6:30 p.m.

Adjournment

Justin Godbehere moved to approve the agenda. Marta Varga seconded the motion.

These minutes were typed by Shannon Sommer, Administrative Assistant.