Board of Directors meeting

As some of you may be aware, the next CSUEU Board of Directors meeting will be held at the Grand Sierra hotel in Reno, Nevada.

Some people are already trying to spin their own reasons why the Board is meeting in Reno:

• There's a casino!  They're gambling with your dues money.
• It's a resort!  They're going to lounge by the pool all day.

Here's the reality, for me, of our Board of Director's meetings:

• I arrive Thursday evening, usually late (8pm or so).
• Friday: Grab breakfast at 8am, into my first Committee meeting by 9am. Grab lunch somewhere in the middle.  Committee meeting ends at 5pm, grab dinner, into Closed Board meeting at 6pm, which rarely gets out before 10:30 or 11pm.
• Saturday: Open Board session is 10am to 5pm, sometimes followed by Bargaining Unit councils from 5:30-7:30pm.  Saturday evening is usually spent with Leg. Committee members fine-tuning the report to the Board delivered by the committee Chair on Sunday.
• Sunday: President's Caucus from 8am to 10am, and then the Board meeting from 10am to 4pm. Drive home, arriving 8 or 9pm.

For me, since I'm spending 10 to 14 hour days on Union business, it really doesn't matter where we meet, because practically every second of my time is scheduled.  Hotel rooms look pretty much the same everywhere. So why are we meeting in Reno? One reason: Money.

You'd think during a down economy that the hotels that we deal with regularly for our Board meetings would be willing to adjust their pricing, and cut us some slack, but that has turned out to not be the case.  The only way to convince them that they are not our only option is to vote with our feet.

Our Finance Committee believes that CSUEU will save somewhere between $8,000 and $30,000 by moving the meeting to Reno. The exact savings are difficult to predict in advance, but $65/night vs. $85/night for a hotel room, multiplied by all the people that attend Board meetings, add up.  Plus the Grand Sierra (a Union hotel) is giving us a lot of stuff for free, because they want our business, that we are charged for heavily at our regular venues.

CSUEU voted to drop member dues by the same amount salaries dropped by Furloughs.  This represented a $600,000 loss of revenue.  On top of that, our expenses have skyrocketed, because CSUEU had to bear the cost of negotiating the Furlough agreement, and now has to travel to each of the campuses going through layoffs (more than a third of the campuses so far) to negotiate mitigation of those layoffs.

So with revenue down and expenses up, we're saving money where we can, and if we can save $30,000 and use it to mitigate layoffs, that's a much better use by my thinking.  Oh, and I was raised Quaker, who don't believe in gambling, so for me casinos are just noisy distractions to pass through on the way to getting food.

I'd rather be spending our money in California, but it would be irresponsible of me to insist on California getting $6,000 in tax revenue and costing our members $30,000.  Hopefully we can use this experience to force the California hotels to match the deals offered by their Reno counterparts.

Please let me know if you have any questions, and I'll do my best to answer them.  This was not a decision made lightly, and without much soul-searching, but the Board voted to do the best thing by our members and the organization.

Sincerely,

Andrew