All right, we're gonna go ahead and call the Valdez Museum Historical Archive Corporation Annual Meeting of Members October 7th, 2025 to order.

So roll call BMHA corporation.

All members are present except for board member Love who is absent and excused.

We have Olivia Foster online, and we have Lester Green offline.

Going to the consent agenda, approval of meeting uh meeting minutes from October 1st, 2024.

Are there any changes or corrections to the minutes up as present?

Seeing none, minutes are approved as presented.

Now we're gonna move into annual reports.

We're gonna start off with the uh board reports.

There you go.

Gotcha.

Better okay.

Uh I'm gonna cover the generalities and the basic uh museum information is gonna details will come later from April.

So uh the first thing I'd like to say is that the museum is actually doing very well right now.

Uh we are in good shape despite uh some transitions.

We have some new people.

We have April Ashardine who is taken over from Faith, who you guys knew pretty well, and uh there's a bit of a learning curve there.

Uh fortunately for her, she has a strong background in nonprofit museum operation.

Uh, but she still had a lot to learn about Valdez and and uh our business and our particular museum.

So uh that's actually gone well because she has a you know strong staff to rely on to help her with that transition.

Plus, we have this year a very strong board who is a big help in making that transition.

So overall it's gone pretty smoothly, and uh we're still in good shape, which if you've seen the budget material, you'll see that uh you know we're we're we're looking good in that respect too.

So uh one of the important things that I think is one of the reasons we're in good in very good shape, and uh one of the reasons we look to be have a strong future is our board of directors, which we have a good showing here.

Uh this is my personal opinion.

This I've been involved in this for quite some time, and this is I think is the strongest board of directors as far as uh the buy-in they have, the principals, their interest in the way what we're doing.

Uh the the amount of work that they put out is um quite amazing, and uh so for me it's it's just been wonderful.

It's a strong working board that is doing their job and uh supporting the museum.

So there they are, and very happy to have them.

So uh one of the things we have, as you probably know, is a lot of uh different committees uh on the board.

The there's a number of them right now are fairly active, in particular the one uh that is working the uh transition or the uh feed up to our uh annual primary fundraiser.

So our fundraising committee is uh working hard right now lately, and then we have uh a lot of other committees that are some not so active right now, but we've had uh a uh one of my committees has been the uh strategic plan committee, and we took our older strategic plan, kind of dusted it off, and we had a work session to where we're starting to build a new uh strategic plan with some new new and different goals and modifying it, updating it.

Uh still a work in progress, and we'll we'll have further meetings in the future, and I'll have more to say on that in a little bit, but uh because the board and themselves, all the board members are active, all of our committees are are very active and working very well.

So I lots of good news for that.

So the to make this, I guess, kind of short speaking of committees.

One of the most important committees that we have is an ad hoc committee for policy review and uh changes.

That committee was kind of recognized as a necessity because we kept referring to our various policies and the uh bylaws and even the uh article of incorporation for references to make sure we were doing things right, and found out that in some cases we weren't doing things right, and we needed to make change, but when we go back into our policy to review those, we found that uh a lot of our policies were out of date and were sometimes not working for for what we needed, and uh so we started up a policy committee.

Uh chairman of that's Martha.

Oh, there she is, the one over the other side over there.

Martha's our chairman, she's been very powerful.

Chairman, doing a lot of work and helping us.

She has the uh connections to the city, so she is familiar with the city's documents and uh the policy and the bylaws and things like that.

So it's it's been invaluable for us to have her on that committee and leading that committee.

One of the things uh we know looking forward to what we're gonna do in the future.

The committee policy on the policy committee is still very uh very much in progress.

We have done quite a bit of changes, but then we've we've lately gotten involved in uh the uh fundraising event and all the other stuff.

So uh we will be continuing to work on that until we have a complete what we're doing is going through each and every starting right from the beginning of every policy.

We're reading all the way through, finding out where we have any problems, correlations, misrepresentations, or anything else that we find that needs to be changed, and we're we're making a record of that, and then we'll go back and make changes.

We're also looking at bylaws, which we have found some new uh number of things that we will be bringing to uh the members to propose changes and in the bylaws, but they just don't seem to fit right.

And there's uh just a one small example I just recently discovered uh for example is uh a difference between the bylaws and the articles and corporation as far as corporation members.

The uh bylaws says that membership of the museum corporation is limited to those persons holding office on the city council and the city of Validees, and that's it.

The articles and corporations says the members and corporate of this corporation shall be incumbent members of the Vallee City Council and will retain their position as members in the corporation until their successors on the Valley City Council take office.

Now that's the same, but it also says the city manager and the chairman of the board of directors of the museum corporation will serve as non-voting ex officio members and will retain the position until his or her successors are appointed.

So if you go by the bylaws, I'm a member of your committee.

I don't have a vote, right?

But if uh we go by the bylaws, then I'm gonna have a few more meetings, I guess.

But so anyway, that's just an example of the types of things that we're finding.

Uh and it's a constant discovery, and we're going through and looking at other city documents and everything to as a you know, some kind of a guiding light as to what we she should be seeing, and uh and it's it I think it's one of the most important things that we've been doing this year, and and we'll continue in the next quarter at least on that, probably even more than that.

But so anyway, museum's doing great, we're hard at work.

Committees, I mean, our board of directors is the best I've ever seen, and uh we have also an incredible staff, which help April through all of her transition, and uh and do their regular job, and they're doing a fine job of it.

We have you know a lot of things they have to deal with is the increased amount of cruise ships as an example, and uh all the various normal day-to-day things, and and all the the uh new uh shows that we have that they're they're putting on.