Will,

I finally understand the purpose for your posts. You should have been more direct at the outset – I had truly believed that your concern was over the pricing level of our cards and the utilization of the monies that were collected, whether they were used for state or national purposes.

I can now see that your concern was directed to the use of the additional $5 card fee. I’m going to go out on a limb (although it seems like a pretty strong branch) and guess that you are aware that $2 is going to be paid to Kathy as compensation for her position as state membership director. There was never any effort to hide this fact – all of the board members were clearly informed about it and I was going to make a special point of calling attention to it at our state body meeting when the fee increase and financials were discussed. Here is the reasoning for adding this stipend.

For the past several years, I have had board members recommend that Kathy should be properly compensated for the vast range of duties which the state imposes on her. Most, if not all, of the other states with our types of numbers pay their staff, but I was resistant. I have always been a volunteer for this organization, whether it was when I was club director, district director, Kids’ state director or now that I am state chairman. That may have been unfair to Kathy, who in some ways just got pulled along for the ride, but she was a good sport and went along with it. A few years ago, the board decided to begin paying her 50 cents per card, which wasn’t much based on the number of hours that she works, but it was a nice honorarium nonetheless.

The reason that I relented in my opposition was due to the alternatives available to our state. If we were to go online, all of our members would have been subjected to an additional $5 processing fee (charged by USAW on all online registrations), none of which would have come back to our state. USAW-Kansas is in the unique position as one of only two states not registering coaches online, and one of very few not registering wrestlers online. After experiencing one year of managing the special requirements placed on us as a condition by USAW of this special arrangement, Kathy had found the time commitment to be much more than she was willing to continue with on a largely volunteer basis. Kathy was already spending well in excess of 40 hours/week working on memberships for the bulk of our folkstyle season, both in dealing with club issues and in satisfying the requirements of USAW. Since those calls also tended to come in at all hours of the day, seven days a week, the hours seemed even more onerous.

With the price increases coming from USAW, it didn’t seem to be a good idea to add another $5 per card online fee on top of the other increases. I saw that we could avoid the additional processing fee and finally pay Kathy something close to what her efforts are worth, something that seemed a win-win. Therefore, I proposed the following to our board and Executive Council on the use of the additional $5 card fee for the 2009-10 season:

• Competitor cards in Kansas increase by $5 to $35. This will bring the competitor cards in line with coaches cards, which are already $35. This would result in a $34,800 increase from memberships (retain $4 after $1 to USAW).
• Keep sanction fees and charter fees the same. We will use part of the increase in competitor cards to offset this loss. I don’t want to be throwing multiple price increases on our membership in a single season, and doing this will keep it simple for our clubs – the only price increase they will see is to the competitor cards. This would result in a $2,850 loss on charters (190 clubs) and an $1,830 loss on sanctions (122 events).
• Compensate Kathy $2 per card for continuing to work with the clubs to do memberships offline. This will avoid increasing coaches and competitors by the $5 online fee. This would be a cost of $21,000 for Kathy (8700 competitors & 1800 coaches). This compensation is comparable with what other states of our size and situation are paying their staff.
• Increase the card monies given to the Kids’ Division by $9,000.

I hope this answers your question.