Board Meeting Notes 2025-05-20

Board Meeting Minutes
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Meeting Start:

Attendance

• Board Members

• Other Members

Agenda

• Consent Agenda
• Committee Reports
• Read mail
• Financial/membership report
• Review the PayPal and banking transactions
• Member leaving reason reports
• Check Freshdesk queue
• New business
• Old business

Minutes

Committee Reports

Reports from Committees

Mail

• We are one of 111 places not to miss in Chicago. That's cool. No one knows how this happened. We can purchase books to learn more about the other 110 at a 50% discount.

Financial Report

• Chase Checking: 75,987.72
• Chase Savings: 100,007.63
• PEX: 20,240.51
• PayPal: 3,801.96
• Building Fund 135,000
• Contingency Fund 40,000
  • note that the Building and Contingency funds are within the bank accounts, not separate from them

Membership Report

• Number of Members: 709
• Quorum: 71

Freshdesk

Login link: https://pumpingstationone.freshdesk.com

New Business

• Tony wants to paint the wall in Electronics (also arts?)
  • This is scary because he might be preparing to show the building to other people.
  • It's also scary because Peter says it has lead in it.
• Wingate has numbers to share with us
  • He has made charts and graphs showing our income and expenses YTD
  • To be on track for the building fund we should have net income of 75k YTD, but we only have $49k
  • This leads to a lot of discussion as to whether we are on track or not - some people feel we are, and some people feel we are not.
  • Carl says that his math says we are fine, because our money in savings can also be put towards buying the building
  • Our budget allowed for spending $89k of last years savings this year
  • We have spent $39k of our area host budgets (total $130k)
  • We all need to sit down and put all of these numbers together, and not have a bunch of conflicting numbers at meetings.
  • We will try to tighten our belts and spend like a hackerspace, not like a fancy business.
  • This isn't a fire alarm yet, it's a warning
• If we got a grant these budget problems would mostly go away
  • Lindsay's grant application we did not receive
  • Wingate's grant application is still pending
  • Wingate gave some more details on another grant we could apply for.
• We all ramble on about a bunch of ways we could make money.
• The boad goes into a closed session.

Old Business

• Building fund
  • Quotes on roof, windows
    • Roofer is still ghosting Ian and not providing quote in a timely fashion
    • Ballpark quote is $75k for the roof, $9k for windows, rounding up to $100k to give room for tariffs.

= Votes

• Board votes to send Eric back to negotiate with Tony and Dan, asking for $100k in concessions. Vote passes.