WCFA Board Meeting Minutes Online Zoom – December 12, 2023 – 1500-1700

Recording in progress to the cloud. President Todd Graves called this WCFA board meeting to order on December 12, 2023, at 1506 hours. Roll call is Greg Bailey, Danielle Sims, myself, Todd Graves, Reed Gracie, Dave Rains, and Tim Logozzo.

President Graves asked Danielle if she wanted to read the minutes from last meeting or just ask everybody if they have read them? Danielle shared her screen and read the minutes from the last meeting May 23, 2023. Greg Bailey moved to accept as read, Tim Logozzo seconded, motion passed.

President Grave ask Danielle to present the Treasurer’s report. The account balance in checking is $47,216 and savings is $59,175. Over the summer Danielle created a QuickBooks checking account from within QuickBooks. It made it easier to bill directly from QB and collect payments for records. The payments come into QuickBooks checking account rather than our main checking account. So, the QuickBooks checking account balance is $3003.00. Total of all our bank accounts is $109,394 today. Danielle said she would only use the payment options in QB as needed. All the classes will be paid the same way we have been through the payment page on our website. Danielle also found a way to integrate PayPal into QuickBooks so that she could reconcile that account more easily. President Graves asked if there was an additional cost now that PayPal is integrated? Danielle explained there is not. More discussion followed about the process of taking payments and how QB receives them. Danielle asked if there were any other questions. President Graves asked for a motion to approve the Treasurers report. Greg Bailey motioned to approve, Dave Rains seconded, motion approved.

President Graves asked Danielle to share the Training Committee topics. Danielle shared where our numbers were with training? It’s pretty close from last year, the basic firefighter course we taught only 80 students this year. Last year was 101. The field days were about the same 51 last year, 48 this year. They had a couple of non-members this year join in so that bumps that number back up to 50. So, it’s pretty much the same. Refreshers 731 last year, 710 this year, non-members we had 237 last year and only 194 this year. Danielle thinks that a new training provider in the area has taken many of our prior-year students. The S-131 class we had 54 last year and only 31 this year. The S-212 we had 24 last year and 35 this year. The S-215 we did 12 last year and 9 this year and then the S-230 class, we did 39 last year and we only did 9 this year, so it was very small class. And then S-290, everybody has to do online since we don’t teach it anymore. And the NWCG discontinued the student workbooks for that class. More discussion followed. Some feel the numbers are down because it has been so hard to get people to come to work. So, just as a reminder that the S-212 student workbook was discontinued, but Danielle found an online publishing company where she can get those workbooks so we can continue to use them when we teach the classroom portion. The fire shelter pamphlets are discontinued also, and we need to figure out whether or not the TC wants Danielle to try to make new fire shelter pamphlets to have for the new people or just say that they’re discontinued and not available for classes anymore? President Graves said he usually has a big stack of them and when he does a refresher maybe one or two people grab one. Those people usually that have never had a refresher before, so I’d say I probably only give away six of those a year. Danielle suggested that if the NWCG are going to do anything, they might come out with the new one.

President Graves added that because the government folks are now talking about, and this year have used VIPR resources to go assist the government agencies with prescribed burning, he is making a recommendation to the board that we consider offering S-219 to our members so that at least the ones that want to go do prescribe burning have some training, he also learned that this course is available online. Danielle added that it is a blended course, the online part is 2 hours. The recommended class is 24 hours, so you it will be a three-day class and, it must be taught by a Firing Boss. More discussion followed. President Graves feels it would look good to the government if our members are showing up with some training. The board wants Danielle to investigate what it would take to put one on. President Graves suggested Rob Lionberger and if the board says it’s OK, he will send him a text today. He said he would also ask him about teaching for us in general. This would be in the Colville area. President Graves also suggested that we send word out to find out how many would be interested. The board would like Danielle to talk with Charlie Curtis first to see if he can teach it. All agreed that a conscientious business owner would want their people to have as much training as they can get before, they send them out on prescribed burns. Reed Gracie made a motion to move this forward, anyone second? Will Judkins asked a question before we second it. How are we going to put this qualification (S-219) on the card so that the government knows that our members have taken this course? Danielle said she thinks it would be like the S-212. When people take the saw class, you add a qualification that says S-212 to their qualifications and you could add an S-219 qualification to the card the same way.

Danielle interjected that she skipped showing the board the Profit and Loss during the Treasurers’ report. She only gave the account balances. She asked if they wanted to see it real quick. She also reminded the board that we still have to come back to a second on the motion that’s on the floor regarding the S-219.

Danielle shared the Profit and Loss, discussed numbers compared to 2022 at the same time. Profit and Loss will be posted on the website and available for view. Our total expenses were $84,000 and our total income was $91,000. No questions, should we vote to accept this P&L with the previous the Treasurer’s report? President Graves asked for a motion to accept the P&L report, Will Judkins motioned, Tim Logozzo seconded, motion approved.

We’re moving back to whether we’re going to investigate doing the S-219. Do we really need to vote on it or, is it just something we want to investigate. Greg Bailey said we need to plan on having one. We just need to know how big of an operation we’re going to need to take care of it. Will Judkins withdrew his previous motion since we probably don’t need to vote on it right now unless the board thinks otherwise. But like the Vice President said, let’s go ahead and have Danielle look into it and maybe potentially send out a notice of interest to the membership or we can ask the ones that show up today. More discussion followed on possible locations for the class. President Graves asked if there was anything more to add for the Training Committee? Danielle said she has been thinking about the refresher and has ideas for lessons. Last year, one of our instructors said that it the refresher needs to be about safety, more than anything else. So, that’s kind of the path she is going to head down planning it. More discussion followed on how the classrooms went, any problems or concerns. Danielle did mention that we didn’t fill up the Omak classes like all the years prior. She expressed concern and said she spoke to Aaron Olmos, CO on Training, about this. She told him that in 2025, our agreement for training is going to be up for review along with all the other associations. She told Aaron that she felt like the CO have dumbed down training by letting every, yahoo on the street get an MOU. More discussion followed about hoping that the CO will work to vet future training providers and not flood the field with poor quality training.

President Graves pointed out that Danielle has done a top-notch job and was glad she pointed that out to the CO, so they understand how professional she is. President Graves personally doesn’t think we’re going to have any problem keeping our MOU that and feels it is because of Danielle’s professionalism and coordinating skills. He knows that we are going to maintain our high standard and that the people we deal with at the FS know that. Danielle added one more thing, the pact test has a new instruction pamphlet. She downloaded it and there’s a new WCFT sheet that they included in the pamphlet, they want vendors to record the time. Discussion about this followed. In the last few years vendors were able to just mark the form PASS/FAIL, this new for has a place for the time. We are assuming that since they didn’t just put PASS/FAIL the time is required on the form. So, Danielle is asking the board what they think about this. Greg Bailey feels that if it asks for a time, we put time in, it’s not worth wasting our time to research. Let’s just do what it says. All agreed that we need to start adding times to the fitness sheet and we will let the membership know at the general meeting.

Old Business.
President Graves asked Danielle if she wanted to tell the board about the By-Laws and some of the changes that we’re making. The By-Laws were sent to the board to review the possible changes. Some discussion followed. Update to the portion about attending meetings will be adjusted to say we recommend they attend. The board said that we would continue the draft outside this meeting and hope to bring a final to the Spring meeting.

The next topic was about purging the database. Danielle said that she started in August, but I really tackled it in the last month. She deleted records that didn’t have any WCFA information in them, most of the records just had somebody’s name and a picture. Some of them had training records that were hand entered from 2005, 06 & 07 so she deleted them out of the database, and she said that there were hundreds of records that were either empty or did not have clickable certificates. She also archived or made inactive anything else that was older than five years. More discussion followed. This will be shared at the general meeting.

Next topic sharing employees. Danielle sent the board an e-mail just before the meeting that said that the board has a discussion almost every year about sharing employees and she has a new suggestion. Every year, when members cross card, she gets a notice from the employer that’s doing a second card. Danielle suggests that she keeps track of those and then at the end of this season she could either release them back to their primary employer or have the member who requested them do it. Sometimes company owners get hung up on a fire, they need somebody right away and they can’t get a hold of the other company owners. There are a lot of employer association that don’t make sense anymore. Danielle asked the board if they want to consider this now or wait until spring? President Graves asked if there was a reason why we needed to do this, was there a problem with database size or usage? Danielle said no, it just has to do with employees, people loaning people out and then they end up on that employer’s roster, and they might only need them for that one season and then somebody else comes along and they want to hire that person, but they can’t. Employers must contact every company associated with the person they hope to hire. Time is always a factor. More discussion followed. The proposal would be to tell the membership that we would like to implement this new thing that at the end of each season, if you borrowed somebody that you don’t really intend to use again, we want you to go in and remove that association. Then Danielle’s going to check the list of all the associations that she knew about and contact the member company if they didn’t remove them. And if they say we mutually agreed on keeping the association, then that’s how it will stay. You don’t have to do it, but if you, on the other hand, wanted an employee, and he was associated with four other employers. Then you must spend all that time trying to track them down. And if you can’t get a hold of one, it’s still hung up. Danielle again offered the board to think about it and decide if we should bring it up at the general meeting or next spring. President Graves likes the thought of Danielle bringing this up to the general membership, and his recommendation is for her to let everybody know that we would like to simplify the database up so that employees go back to their primary employer, unless they request otherwise, and I think that would resolve it.

Will Judkins asked if there was a way in the database to archived automatically? Danielle said there is an option that says, “Archived After Five Years”, but she wasn’t sure how it worked so she asked former President Kevin Curfman, who has extensive knowledge about our database, what the difference is between archived or inactive? Kevin told her that an automatic archive process was started but never completed. Now that the database has been purged, Danielle said perhaps we could go forward from here and have this action automated.

President Graves ask if there was any further discussion or any other old business? Reed Gracie asked if it would be possible to modernize our incident qualification cards? Reed referred to some of the agency cards, and feels that our cards should say, “Incident Qualification Card” on them under our company names. He also suggested that the information be typed in individual boxes. He feels this would make them look more professional. Danielle asked Reed to send her a sample and she would get in touch with our web admin to see if he could develop it. All agreed to look into this and get a sample for the board to approve. President Graves asked Danielle to be sure to bring this up at the general meeting.

Tim Logozzo left the meeting. President Graves asked if there was any other old business?

New business:
President Graves will let the general members know that he will be attending the next Washington State Fire Council meeting on how state dispatch works. There will probably be some people that are going to be complaining about it, wondering how or why it works, and basically what he thought we could talk about is to remind everybody that the state can pretty much do anything they want when it comes to dispatch, they can bypass the VIPR DPL completely if they want to. Much discussion followed.

Danielle reminded President Graves about a something he needed to talk about. He shared that one of our member companies had an employee recently take his life leaving a family behind and a new home. After some discussion the board agree on the amount of $1000. Danielle was directed to send a card to the widow following this meeting. The membership will be made aware of this gift at the meeting coming up later. The board discussed creating a benevolence fund, but it was decided that we wouldn’t because of the extra bookkeeping required for that kind of account, and since this is an infrequent request, we would handle it on an as needed basis.

President Graves brought up giving more money to David Spade, a lobbyist for NWSA. Discussion following with most wanting to know what the $5000 we gave last year did for us. The board recommends the President or Vice President, or whomever we decide would contact the NWSA to see if they need us to continue with this and is there any report on how it’s going?

Membership Update:
We just have one. Port Blakeley had a new person take over and Danielle had him fill out a new associate membership application just to have the corrections on file.

Is there any other new business?
President Graves shared that he’d like to bring up to the general membership that a founding member of the WCFA, who helped write the By-Laws, Tom Graves died November 29th. He’d like to let the membership know that he’s passed and let them know that he was an integral part of the early days of the WCFA.

Spring meeting TBD.

Motion to adjourn by Greg Bailey, seconded by Reed Gracie, meeting adjourned at 1658.