Board Meeting Notes 2024-01-16

Board Meeting Minutes
<< Board Meeting Notes 2024-01-02	2024 Board Meetings	Board Meeting Notes 2024-02-06 >>

Meeting Start:

Attendance

• Board Members
  • Joe M. (remote)
  • James L.
  • Ilya
  • Peter Z.
  • Tam (remote)
  • Eric B.

• Other Members
  • Andrew M.
  • Sky
  • Carl

Minutes

Discussion on previous minutes

• No notes

Committee Reports

Reports from Committees

• Tech Team
  • New WAPs will be purchased because of the budget
  • We should seal the hole in the server room, because it is very cold in there.
  • James has heard reports that Adobe is not working on the new computers?
    • Sky will try to fix it immediately.
    • Sky has found that Lydia was told to remove her two adobe licenses from her budget. CNC still has theres. There are only two licenses right now, instead of the normal four. **** There will be some more discussion here between Sky and the area hosts.

• GenOps
  • We had a little problem yesterday with the heating, the coil inside the makeup air unit burst and flooded the boiler room.
    • Luckily Andrew was there to witness it and work on it.
    • We will have to bring someone in to replace this coil before it gets back online.
      • It wasn't doing much anyway right now for heat, but we should fix it to keep the makeup air running.
      • This is a safety hazard, so we really need to deal with this.
      • This mostly has to do with exhaust stacks being forced to flow backwards.
      • Conversation continued in this vein for some time.
  • Otherwise the heating has been working, except for low pressure in the boiler, which has been corrected.
  • The carbon monoxide detector in the boiler room has 'gone missing'
    • Joe and Peter asks if we can order a new one.
      • There is one sitting at the table in front of Ilya.
        • That is the upstairs one we think
        • It may also be dead?
        • Sky thinks we should just buy some new ones.
          • Sky will buy two new ones.

Mail

• A postcard about a legal notice only to be opened by the intended recipient. But its a postcard... It's fake.
• More spam mail.
• One mail for Brad.

Financial Report

• Chase Checking: $
• Chase Savings: $
• PEX: $
• PayPal: $

Membership Report

• Number of Members: 631
• Quorum: 63

Freshdesk

Login link: https://pumpingstationone.freshdesk.com

• • Tickets have been light recently.

New Business

• Carl brought James incredibly burnt coffee.
  • "That is the most burnt coffee I've ever tasted" -James
  • Peter asks if you can burn it more and turn it into bacon?
    • James says no.
• What is Tams intention with being out of town and on the board?
  • She intends to stay on and help with grant writing, and anything else she can remotely.
• Ilya asks if we should discuss the lease renewal?
  • Eric said he is happy to spearhead conversations with Dan. Though we need to decide what we want to do.
  • Joe suggests that we should discuss the idea of a 5/10 year lease with a lease to own and a balloon payment at the end.
    • Eric likes the solution if Dan is amicable to it.
  • Eric asks if we have talked to Dan at all?
    • James explains that our last contact had too many things in the emails, so he didn't respond to those portions of these emails.
    • Eric has had plenty of time with Dan, and would be happy to begin these conversation.
      • Eric would suggest having a single point person, and is willing to be that person
        • James, Tam, and Joe all agree.
  • Upside to buying the property is in theory we wouldn't have to pay property tax as a non-profit.
    • Though we should have the attorney review that
  • Ilya has been hearing conversations about members of PS:1 loaning money to PS:1 in order to buy our building, and thinks that the attorney would be useful as well.
  • Peter brings up that maybe we'd want a larger space.
    • Eric brings up that it took almost a full year to utilize the expansion space, so if we decide we want to move there will be a lot of costs and timelines to think through.
    • The discussion continued in this vein for a bit.
  • There is some discussion about this building: https://straussrealty.com/property/3455-n-elston-ave/
  • Eric will try to reach out to him in the next three weeks.
• Eric brings up member communications and community
  • The Google groups was toxic but it had interaction.
  • What did we do to replace that?
    • We screwed up.
  • Joe suggests again nuking slack for a bit to drive community to discourse.
  • Peter suggests more physical meetups as well.