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Thread: 5- Proposed 2012-2013 budget

  1. #51
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    Quote Originally Posted by Brett Campbell View Post
    Michael Von Keitz could explain website charge better than me, but I trusted him when he said it was reasonable and necessary, especially since he was president of OCA at the time.
    No offence to either of you, but this is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into the whole mess with Barry in the first place.

    The OCA website should cost at most $70 or so per year to operate. So while a charge of almost $400 may have some reasonable justification, it's unusual enough to warrant a little bit of extra attention!
    Christopher Mallon
    FIDE Arbiter

  2. #52

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    This is the reason why I wanted to avoid this sort of thing. I believe the website cost is for 5 years worth of website. This seems close to you're $70. As for the overdraft fee, I have no idea about overdrafts with banking but I trust Brett and to be honest the $40 fee in the past seems like too small of a deal to really worry about to me. 100 k in salary from trillium grants....that one bothers me, $40 doesn't especially when it has a good explanation. It most definitely doesn't stand out as something that is created out of dishonesty. In the future, with the increased scrutiny provided by public meetings, such a future expense can be questioned; doing so now will only ruffle feathers and hurt feelings. I may be misinterpreting things here though, where is the increase of 1800%, a $2 fee increasing to $37 is a large increase (not unindicative of our banks either) but not 1800%.

  3. #53

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christopher Mallon View Post
    No offence to either of you, but this is exactly the kind of thinking that got us into the whole mess with Barry in the first place.

    The OCA website should cost at most $70 or so per year to operate. So while a charge of almost $400 may have some reasonable justification, it's unusual enough to warrant a little bit of extra attention!
    I agree completely, the decisions made by the president should be visible by all and he should be accountable for them. At least for the previous term and this upcoming term, I think we're doing a far better job of that.

  4. #54
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    Quote Originally Posted by Rob Clark View Post
    This is the reason why I wanted to avoid this sort of thing. I believe the website cost is for 5 years worth of website. This seems close to you're $70. As for the overdraft fee, I have no idea about overdrafts with banking but I trust Brett and to be honest the $40 fee in the past seems like too small of a deal to really worry about to me. 100 k in salary from trillium grants....that one bothers me, $40 doesn't especially when it has a good explanation. It most definitely doesn't stand out as something that is created out of dishonesty. In the future, with the increased scrutiny provided by public meetings, such a future expense can be questioned; doing so now will only ruffle feathers and hurt feelings. I may be misinterpreting things here though, where is the increase of 1800%, a $2 fee increasing to $37 is a large increase (not unindicative of our banks either) but not 1800%.
    Even if it was for 5 years of the website, we're still getting ripped off. That's about what it costs to run chesscanada.info and this site gets far more traffic...

    Anyways, you're right, $2 to $37 is not an 1800% increase, it's only 1750%. Did we at least get all of the financial records for the account in exchange for paying off this balance? (since TD evidentally decided that the OCA *does* in fact have rights to the account!)
    Christopher Mallon
    FIDE Arbiter

  5. #55

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    Quote Originally Posted by Christopher Mallon View Post
    Even if it was for 5 years of the website, we're still getting ripped off. That's about what it costs to run chesscanada.info and this site gets far more traffic...

    Anyways, you're right, $2 to $37 is not an 1800% increase, it's only 1750%. Did we at least get all of the financial records for the account in exchange for paying off this balance? (since TD evidentally decided that the OCA *does* in fact have rights to the account!)
    Hi Chris

    The tone of your discourse is disturbing to me. For whatever reason, you were not able to achieve any co-operation from Barry, so you were not able to get access to the TD account he created, and this created the problem of continuing service charges, which you could take responsibility for as you were president of the OCA at that time in 2008. You are right, the account was $2.80 in overdraft March 31, 2008, and I remember attending the OCA meeting later in May 2008, by which time the community fee of $10 (a reasonable monthly charge for any bank account) went through on April 30,2008 along with an overdraft charge of $.05. There were a number of other charges that went through for a period of time, until the bank closed the account, giving up on the $34.13 as of September 30, 2008.

    I managed to establish cordial relations with Barry in 2010, and convinced him to meet me at the bank, so I could get a copy of the corporation papers and a print out of the bank statements going back to 2004, so we could get our taxes done. When I was there, I made the decision to pay the overdraft account as a goodwill gesture, believing that OCA's reputation then, and now and going forwards, was more important than stiffing the bank out of some monthly service charges, since Barry declined to pay and felt he was doing me a favour by just being there. The $3.05 was to photocopy the records, adding up to $37.18. I had to drive up to Brampton (putting gas in the car) and the whole trip took over two hours, although I never asked for any gas money.

    Rob jogged my memory about the website, which is paid for for 5 years. There may have been some one time set up charges included. So, in my opinion, about $70 a year is okay. Even for a simple domain name which I obtained at a discount for my corporation from a friend doing that service , I pay $39.55 annually, and that's solely to keep the domain name without any extra services, such as privacy protection or web hosting. I looked up the email from Michael, who evidently shopped around for a good deal. So the five years includes WHOIS privacy protection, the domain name, and Web Hosting,all for $365.44 U.S. or $393.26 Canadian.
    You are getting far too excited about these minor expenses when the real problem was the mismanagement of the over $100,000 Trillium grant by the OCA administration in the past before I ever got involved.

  6. #56
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    Quote Originally Posted by Brett Campbell View Post
    The tone of your discourse is disturbing to me.
    Tone is a very difficult thing over the internet. I'm not trying to be nasty, and I'm not trying to attack anyone, I'm just trying to make sure we're not wasting money, since we don't really have all that much money.

    For whatever reason, you were not able to achieve any co-operation from Barry, so you were not able to get access to the TD account he created, and this created the problem of continuing service charges, which you could take responsibility for as you were president of the OCA at that time in 2008. You are right, the account was $2.80 in overdraft March 31, 2008, and I remember attending the OCA meeting later in May 2008, by which time the community fee of $10 (a reasonable monthly charge for any bank account) went through on April 30,2008 along with an overdraft charge of $.05. There were a number of other charges that went through for a period of time, until the bank closed the account, giving up on the $34.13 as of September 30, 2008.

    I managed to establish cordial relations with Barry in 2010, and convinced him to meet me at the bank, so I could get a copy of the corporation papers and a print out of the bank statements going back to 2004, so we could get our taxes done. When I was there, I made the decision to pay the overdraft account as a goodwill gesture, believing that OCA's reputation then, and now and going forwards, was more important than stiffing the bank out of some monthly service charges, since Barry declined to pay and felt he was doing me a favour by just being there. The $3.05 was to photocopy the records, adding up to $37.18. I had to drive up to Brampton (putting gas in the car) and the whole trip took over two hours, although I never asked for any gas money.
    Actually, Barry did write a letter for me to TD, it still wasn't good enough for them for some reason. I never said we shouldn't have paid the money to TD, just that it's typical of banks to do whatever they can to run up the charges. I'm glad we did get the records though.

    Rob jogged my memory about the website, which is paid for for 5 years. There may have been some one time set up charges included. So, in my opinion, about $70 a year is okay. Even for a simple domain name which I obtained at a discount for my corporation from a friend doing that service , I pay $39.55 annually, and that's solely to keep the domain name without any extra services, such as privacy protection or web hosting. I looked up the email from Michael, who evidently shopped around for a good deal. So the five years includes WHOIS privacy protection, the domain name, and Web Hosting,all for $365.44 U.S. or $393.26 Canadian.
    You are getting far too excited about these minor expenses when the real problem was the mismanagement of the over $100,000 Trillium grant by the OCA administration in the past before I ever got involved.
    I pay $14.95 a year for domain names, and that's assuming I don't buy multi-years for discounts or wait for a sale to renew, which I do - usually ends up being well under $10 a year. But since it's paid for, I'll just make a note to re-examine it in 3 years when it's close to renewal again, because I'm sure we could have saved at least $100 - which even if you stretch it out over 5 years works out to 1% of the OCA's non-League budget.
    Christopher Mallon
    FIDE Arbiter

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