Quote Originally Posted by Stuart Brammall
The idea behind moving to a single fee (one that should in my opinion replace the rating fee) is that, in reality, the rating of tournaments is the only thing of value the average player recieves from this organization. Sure we have a news-letter, but we all know that no one pays a membership if they do not plan to play in tournaments.

When do you use a CFC membership except when playing in tournaments? Never.

We provide one service; we should charge one fee.

When I write a cheque to the CFC, I do it to get my games rated--- That is to say that I am viewing the money from both my membership and the rating fees collected from the events as both going to pay for the rating my events.

The reason why I thing the single fee should be what is now the rating fee is simply because not everyone plays the same number of events. Oubviously this new single fee would need to be significantly higher then the current rating fee--- looking at the budget right now I can see we get aprox. $31,000 from rating fees, this indcated aprox, 10,300 rating fees paid. To make up the total of the current mempership fees + rating fee (aprox $82,000), the new fee would need to be aprox. $8. ---- Probably should be a little higher since I have assumed everyone is using SwissSys and paying the low rating fee.

Why is this more fair?

This way you're not asking someone planning to only play one event to pay $9 per game (($43 ontario membership +$3 rating fee)/ 5 games in a weekender) while I sitting across the board from him am getting my games rated for $1.5 each(($43 ontario membership + (9X$3 rating fee)) / (9 tournaments X 5 games per event))
Stuart, I respectfully disagree. I doubt that your type of explanation, no matter how correct or not it might actually be, will ever get traction with Joe Regular player. The immense danger is that people will see it as a gigantic rating fee (insanely far more than the $0.40 that Larry charges, for example) and we risk a revolt against CFC-rated chess. There already are pockets in the country who are using online rating services, rather than pay the $3/$5 (and/or the CFC membership fee). I think, that at this time, we should not look the current $3/$5 rating fee horse in the mouth, and leave it as is.

It seems that the proposals for CFC annual membership fee rationalization have as much to do with perceived fairness, than with feeling gouged, no?

Anyway, it would be great to continue this with the proposed committee?!