Roger de Coverly wrote: ↑Sat Apr 27, 2019 10:47 am
The ECF two major areas of expenditure are and always have been its staffed office and the International budget and its income has been a tax on the chess players whether levied at an organisation level or per head.
This was indeed reinforced by the meeting.
David Eustace did not agree with my maths on percentage spend on women's chess. I wanted to express it as a very low percentage of total income, his view was it is a much higher percentage of discretionary spend. I think you see here a main point of difference between someone like me who is currently a dissident and those in Council who support the board's strategy. My view is that if women's chess is a key strategic objective, and a reason to increase membership fees, the board ought to be spending more than 0.5% of its membership income on it. The boards position is that they are, but I am still unconvinced.
Tim Herring had prepared an interesting breakdown of spending, as an alternative view of the budget. I think the intent was to help reject the motion to limit international spending. They argued the Bronze members are not contributing to the International budget, since all of the net income from this group is spent on administration. But it did also open some discussion on why the administration spend is so high.
I have been arguing for years that I suspect a significant amount of the administration budget must be spent supporting the executive Directors. But David Thomas and David Eustace explicitly rejected that it was anything other than the base cost of having an ECF, particularly the cost of collecting membership income.
My emotional reaction is to say the membership system is failing. If the take up of self service is insufficient to free up the office to do something more useful that seems a big issue. I might be overreacting, but I have not yet been able to work out why.