THE LEEDS ASSOCIATION OF ENGINEERS
Minutes of the Council Meeting held at 7.30pm on Thursday 7th March 2013 at the Cornerhouse Club Leeds
1. Attendance. A. Kibler (Vice President) in the chair with B. Yates, A. Rogers, G. Toulson, M. Murray and I. Blakeley.
2. Apologies for absence. J. Aldersley, J. Bentley, J. McClarty, K. Hegarty & J. Shergill.
3. Minutes of the Previous Meeting, dated 7th February 2013 were, approved & signed.
4. Matters Arising. None.
5. Treasurers Report. In the absence of Mr. Bentley no information of financial transactions was available for last month. However Mr. Toulson circulated draft copies of the independently audited accounts that have been prepared for the coming AGM. Mr. Toulson ran through the accounts with council and we agreed that there is nothing in the figures to cause alarm. A correction in the subsidy for the 2012 Annual Dinner is required, this will result in the deficit for the year being only £19. We all agreed this was very satisfactory. Mr. Toulson commented that Mr. Mallinson had been able to produce the accounts very quickly because of the concise and accurate way in which Mr. Bentley had supplied him the information. We should all thank Mr. Bentley for his efforts.
6. Annual Church Service. No Change.
7. Correspondence. Mr. Rogers received a letter from Tom Robertshaw who represents The Haven (breast cancer charity) thanking us for our £45 donation; this was from the raffle at our Annual Dinner (Lord Mayor’s nominated charity). The vicar’s nominated charity also received a cheque for £45. Mr. Yates told us he wrote to the Keighley Association of Engineers and thanked them for supporting us by booking a table at our dinner, he said we hope to reciprocate by booking a table at their dinner.
8. Current Programme. We were advised at the end of February that Surgical Innovations were unable to accommodate our visit at the end of March. Mr. Murray has organised a potential lecture on pneumatics from a colleague of Mike Bate (one of our membership). Mr. Rogers will check the availability of the Scandura venue in Cleckheaton and book it if available.
9. Membership. No Change.
10. Next Session. Mr. Yates said he is not prepared to organise next years programme as he has many other calls on his time. He said the lectures are quite easy to obtain but factory visits are becoming almost impossible.
11. Website. Mr. Toulson reported that once again he is having trouble with the web site. He said the problem is similar to one he had previously where he lost use of the visual editor. He managed to fix the original problem after receiving advice from Kally (Mr. Shergill’s brother) but having cleared the first problem a second one arose which prevented him accessing events. Kally is investigating the problem and will report back to Mr. Toulson when he has a solution. We discussed previously the need to look at past events and lectures on the website, this requires an archive to be created on the website, Kally has created a tab on the webpage but Mr. Toulson needs to input the information because we have only been using the current website less than one year. Mr. Toulson said we have two invoices connected to the website due in the next few months. The first of which is £23.99 for the Domain name registration (payable in May 2013) and covers us for 2 years. The second bill is £119.98 for hosting the website and is due in September. He advised us that Kally feels the overall bill is high and has suggested we look at alternatives, on his website he uses a host called “Big Wet Fish” they charge £57.97 for two years, this includes both the above charges. We agreed to discuss this at our April council meeting. Mr. Toulson has added a brief article and a link to the Lifelites charity which Dr. Richard Johnson, president of the Welders and Joiners Association, collected sponsorship for at our Annual Dinner.
12. Golf. 2013 tournament is arranged for the 4th July at Wetherby Golf Club.
13. Annual Dinner. Mr. Rogers reported that feedback from Keighley Association of Engineers was positive; they had enjoyed the food and felt the new format with reduced speeches is an improvement. Our choice of speaker got a mixed reaction; some of us thought that something more light-hearted would have been more appropriate for the Annual Dinner. Mr. Kibler commented that if we continue to invite ladies / partners to the dinner we should move away from engineering based speakers. We discussed the attendance, which was down on last year. We had 71 people to pay for, of which 59 were paying guests / members. Four people paid but were unable to attend. The cost of the dinner was £1381-95 plus the fee to the main speaker; Mr. Rogers commented that without the main speaker the evening would have made a small profit of £19. We noted that the people who gave us factory visits / lectures did not accept their complimentary free dinner, none of them attended. We agreed that we should use a similar format next year because nobody had commented we miss those long speeches. We agreed that in future we would not allow collections by other charities at the Annual Dinner because this undermines what we are doing with the Lord Mayor and the Church. We discussed speakers for the future dinners, Mr. Hegarty had given a name of a speaker who appeared at his golf club, Mr. Rogers, on checking the website where he advertises said his fee would be around £500. Mr. Yates suggested we might ask Hilary Benn, but other council members felt that this would be too political. However it was suggested that Mr. Yates approach him to see if he could give a non-political talk. We have a speaker for the 149th Annual dinner who will give a talk on Vulcan Bombers, so we just have to think about the 148th and 150th after which point we will probably change the format of the dinner.
14. Any other Business. Having no other business Mr. Kibler closed the meeting.
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