July 28, 2004
Summer is flying fast. Time seems to accelerate year after year. Now that we have closed the books on GSA fiscal year 2003-2004, we can look back on what the North-Central Section has accomplished.
First, I want to thank Joachim Dorsch, David Kirschner, and everyone else at St. Louis University, the Missouri Geological Survey, and other units who put together the 2004 Section Meeting at St. Louis. Until you have been the chair of a Section Meeting you have little idea of the amount of work and effort that you and your colleagues personally have to do to pull off a successful meeting. As a speaker, I want to congratulate Joachim for putting together a fine program with many thought-provoking talks and posters in an excellent venue. I also want to thank Joachim and David for their fiscal responsibility. The final figures for the meeting costs and income are in and it looks as if the meeting finished in the black by more than $19,491! This will allow us to give more student awards and to continue to meet our Section goal of having enough funds set aside to fully pay for a meeting if we have a bad loss.
Ray Coveney, Sayed Hasan, and Al Schneider went off the GSA North-Central Section Management Board at the end of the St. Louis meeting. I, and I hope you, want to thank them for their faithful and dedicated service to the Section. Carrie Jennings and Barbara Lusardi of the Minnesota Survey are coming on to the Management Board as Chair and Vice Chair, while Don Mikulic begins a three-year term as Member-at-Large.
During 2003 we awarded many student grants. We made awards to 62 students from 33 schools. That is wonderful. It translated into what looked to me like proportionately many more students attending the Section Meeting than in the past. And that is wonderful too. What we need from you professional members is your reaffirmation to the work of our Section and to the participation of your students in Section Meetings. After all we use most of our income to support students for travel and research. Please encourage your students to go to the 2005 North-Central Section meeting in Minneapolis. Carrie Jennings and Barbara Lusardi are doing an excellent job of planning the meeting. Both the program and the place are interesting and worth the participation of both you and your students.
Finally, I want to report that I will be stepping down as your Executive Secretary at the end of the 2005 Section Meeting in Minneapolis. I will have served you in this capacity for eight years at that point. A new person has been nominated to take my place and is willing to serve you. I appreciate all of the help and support you have given the Section during my years in office.
Best regards!
Bob Diffendal, Executive Secretary
August 5, 2003
Posted August 5, 2003 Summer is flying fast. Time seems to accelerate year after year. Now that we have closed the books on GSA fiscal year 2003-2003 we can look back on what the North-Central Section has accomplished.
First, I want to thank Ray Coveney, Sayed Hasan, and everyone else at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, the Missouri Geological Survey, and other units who put together the meeting at Kansas City. Until you have been the chair of a Section Meeting you have little idea of the amount of work and effort that you personally have to do to pull off a successful meeting. As a speaker, I want to congratulate Ray for putting together a fine program with many thought-provoking talks and posters.
During 2002 we awarded more student grants than I can remember having been awarded before. Now I will admit that we gave most students smaller awards than in the past, but we made awards to 118 students from 46 schools. That is wonderful. It translated into what looked to me like proportionately many more students attending the Section Meeting than in the past. And that is wonderful too. What we need from you professional members is your reaffirmation to the work of our Section and to the participation of your students in Section Meetings. After all we use most of our income to support students for travel and research. Please encourage your students to go to the 2004 North-Central Section meeting in St. Louis. Both the program and the place are interesting and worth their time.
Finally, I want to report that GSA is doing fewer things for the Sections and charging us more for what they do. This can only be expected, given the budget problems that GSA has and the fact that we were getting many services from Headquarters in the past for either no charge or a charge less than cost. One recent example is that GSA will no longer do bulk mailings for us. Because of this change I have decided to do fewer mailings and to rely on e-mail and the web site for communications with you. Please let me know if you favor this approach or not. I will read all of your suggestions.
Best regards!
Bob Diffendal, Executive Secretary
November 20, 2002
Recently, Greg Nadon sent me an e-mail message regarding the new fee for abstracts submitted to Section meetings. This reminded me that I should have updated you all on decisions made at a “Section Summit” held last summer. I had informed Ray Coveney about some of these decisions because they will affect his meeting (as well as future meetings) but forgot to update you others. Here’s the belated, but important, update.
On Thursday, April 25, 2002, Jack Hess, GSA Executive Director called together representatives from all six GSA Sections to discuss a number of matters important to Sections and to GSA at a “Section Summit” held at GSA Headquarters in Boulder, CO. Cindy Carney and I represented the North-Central Section at this meeting. Also present were Tony Naldrett, GSA President, Sharon Mosher, GSA Past President and several GSA staff members who work with Section officers. Minutes of the meeting are in the Day 1, consent agenda of the GSA Council meeting held in Denver, CO, on October 26, 2002. What follows are my observations on what took place.
Jack started the discussions by outlining the then current GSA budget problems (which have worsened since the meeting). He then outlined how Sections are contributing to these problems. It seems that GSA national has been essentially underwriting some Section activities or parts of them. GSA could formerly do this without causing itself financial problems in the heady days when markets were going up and up still higher and finances were good. Now that we are in a reversal, this underwriting is no longer possible. Sections will have to pay their shares for services done at headquarters and previously underwritten by GSA.
We had extended discussions on means and methods to achieve revenue neutrality for Sections. In the end we agreed upon the following steps to try to do this starting in 2003.
First, we agreed to allow GSA to charge an abstract fee of $10 for Section meetings starting in 2003. Second, if GSA is acting as the registration agent for a Section meeting GSA will increase the charge for their services to a maximum of $23/professional and $11/student and complimentary for registration. This fee will be factored in to overall registration charges for a Section meeting. At the end of the 2003 fiscal year GSA will send Section secretaries an accounting on whether or not the fees listed above achieved revenue neutrality. We will then look at the situation again in early 2004 and try to agree upon any necessary adjustments to those fees.
We also discussed and agreed upon future “Section Summits”, a protocol for developing nominations for selection of future Section Representatives on Council, and discontinuing binding the program for a meeting into the abstract volume. We further agreed that GSA would continue to pay the expenses for attendance of our Sections representatives to the GSA Education Committee meetings and we Sections would continue to pay expenses of our representatives to the GSA Geology and Public Policy Committee meetings.
We had no choice regarding adding the abstract fee charge, only on how much the charge would be initially. Our choice on the fee increase that GSA would charge for handling registration was to either use someone else for registration services or to accept an increase. We Section officers negotiated the amounts listed above and the idea of a full accounting at the fiscal year’s end to see where we finished.
I don’t think that any fair-minded member of a Section would want costs of Section activities to be a financial burden on GSA at large. This was the best solution we could arrive at to begin to solve the part of GSA’s budget problems that we are causing.
Bob Diffendal, GSA North-Central Section Secretary
July 31 , 2002
The combined 2002 Southeast/North-Central Sections Meeting at Lexington, KY, is over and was successful on all counts. We finished the meeting in the black. Our total attendance was about 1,163. All field trips and short courses offered were run. We filled the room spaces at the Hyatt that we contracted for and did not have to pay a penalty.
All of the above is due primarily to the fine work of the organizing committee. I want to express my thanks to John Kiefer and Jim Cobb of the Kentucky Geological Survey and their colleagues, to those from the Department of Geosciences, and to North-Central Section chair Tom Lowell of the University of Cincinnati and vice-chair Cindy Carney from Wright State University. All of these people and organizations worked extremely hard to make the meeting a success. I also want to thank Don Neal, Southeast Section Secretary for all of his help. Finally, thanks to all of the participants. I hope that you found the meeting helpful in the continuing development of your careers.
The 2003 North-Central Section Meeting will be held in Kansas City, Missouri, from 23-25 March. I have been working closely with Ray Coveney, chair of the meeting, and his colleagues from the University of Missouri-Kansas City on planning for the event. Everything seems on track for another outstanding meeting in 2003. Be sure to put this meeting on your calendar now and plan to submit an abstract. If you have students, be sure to encourage them to attend and to participate as well.
Robert F. Diffendal, Jr.
Executive Secretary
July 31, 2002
April 17 , 2002
At the end of our joint Southeast/North-Central Section Meeting several people went off the Section Management Board and several others joined the Board. Going off were Bob Corbett and Skip Nelson from Illinois State and John Attig from the Wisconsin Survey. New to the Board are the Chair and Vice-Chair for the meeting next year at Kansas City, Ray Coveney and Syed Hasan of the University of Missouri-Kansas City Geosciences Department. Also joining the Board is Joanne Kluessendorf of the Weiss Earth Science Museum of the University of Wisconsin. Joanne will serve a three- year term as a Member-at-Large.
I can’t say enough about the outstanding job that Skip Nelson and Bob Corbett did in running the fine meeting at Illinois State in 2001. The meeting was financially sound and helped the Section to build up its accounts to help future students and to insure future meetings will be financially successful. I hope that Bob and Skip will continue to work for the Section in the future.
I want to thank Tom Lowell, Cindy Carney, and their colleagues, and John Kiefer, Jim Cobb and all of the folks from the Southeast Section who made the meeting in Lexington this year turn out so well. We don’t have a final count yet on registration, but it appears to have topped 1,220. This is a wonderful turnout.
Next year our meeting will be at Kansas City, Missouri. Ray Coveney should do another excellent job putting this meeting together with the help of his staff and other people from the Section.
Future meetings are now planned through 2007. We will hold the 2004 meeting in St. Louis, 2005 in Minneapolis, 2006 in Akron, Ohio, and 2007 in Lawrence, KS, if the South-Central Section approves their Section Secretary’s offer to host a combined meeting in 2007.
The Geological Society of America now closes its fiscal year at the end of June. At the present time we appear to be in sound financial shape. I will be able to tell you more about this after the Section Meeting bills are paid off and after the year-end financial statement of the balance in our accounts in Boulder is sent to me in July. Look for more news on this and other Section matters in this space shortly after I receive the statement.
REMINDER: Please tell your students that application forms for travel to the 2002 GSA Annual Meeting, the 2002 Undergraduate Research Grants and the 2003 travel to the Section Meeting at Kansas City are all posted on the North-Central Section web site. They may get to the site either by going through the GSA site, geosociety.org or by going directly to csd.unl.edu, and clicking on the box labeled "sites administered by CSD", and opening the GSA North-Central Section box.
Bob Diffendal, GSA North-Central Section Executive Secretary
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