May 2022 Board Meeting Notes

BAS Board Meeting Minutes May 18, 2022

In attendance in person:

Craig Brockmeier

Rick Buck

Evan Zorn

Denise Gregg

Bob Young

No one attended via Zoom.

Not in attendance:

Duane Perkins

John Blaesi

Rick Bryant

Daryl Doughty

Mike Woods

First Christian Church closing update:

Craig and Evan talked to Mike Bailey May 4. No decision will be made before May 31; on May 31, the city will start leasing the church building month-by-month. Mike has a copy of our Memorandum of Understanding with the church and he has seen our storage rooms. Mike anticipates that we will have access to our storage rooms for at least 3-6 months, which would be some time from early August until early November. The city needs to decide if it needs a convention center or not. The church does have meeting rooms.

We need to start looking for another storage facility, just in case; Denise offered to contact Acorn Storage since she looked into this last January and at that time, Acorn was the only storage company that had storage units that would meet our needs, although they didn’t have any units available in January of the type we would need.

Library display takedown:

We decided to do this on Saturday, May 28, and Denise will notify the library. Evan won’t be able to help but Rick Buck can during the afternoon of May 28.

Sunfest:

We have minimal staffing and could use more volunteers.

Woolaroc event in the fall: We didn’t decide on a date yet.

Girl Scout events at Camp Tallchief, at which girls will work on astronomy badges:

We would like to know if any Bartlesville-area youth would be participating. That would help us decide if we would like to participate in these camps. (We usually prefer to participate in Girl Scout events at Camp Wah-Shah-She.) The camp is in the Lake Skiatook area and probably would take about an hour to get there.

Total solar eclipse April 8, 2024:

Ron is considering going to Enchanted Rock State Park, which is near him.

Gary Spears/Spears Travel is planning a trip to Mazatlan.

We will bring up this subject at the June Club meeting and ask people to think about possible interest in a Club event to go view the eclipse, and report back at the July meeting. Now is not too soon to start thinking about this; other clubs are already discussing it.

Jo Allyn Lowe Star Garden:

Considering the questions we have about mowing and insurance, we decided to defer the idea of arranging for a mower for Jo Allyn Lowe for the time being, perhaps for a year, and revisit at some future date. In the meantime, we could still have the City’s proposed agreement reviewed by a lawyer. We discussed the idea that had been brought up that if we are responsible for mowing, could we still be considered liable if someone tripped in the Star Garden, not at a BAS event. We agreed that this is a valid concern that we would want to have addressed by a lawyer. Craig also reminded us that we need to consider federal and Oklahoma tort law as part of this; we would need legal help with this as well.

We can still do viewing at Jo Allyn Lowe in the mowed area between the south parking lot and the walking path, where we had a star party in April. We can also use Osage Hills State Park and Tri County Tech.

Evan also brought up that our Club insurance policy doesn’t cover claims arising from the use of marijuana.

We can also see what other clubs have done with their observing areas. Some that we know about are fenced; Jo Allyn Lowe wouldn’t be.

Attendance at Club meetings and volunteering for Club events in general:

We need to get good speakers for Club meetings.

Gary Nealis, who spent his career at NASA, has offered to present on the Hubble Space Telescope deployment and repair missions at our June and July meetings. (He has enough material to do two meetings on this topic!)

The July Club meeting will be Thursday, July 7 in meeting room A; Denise has already set this up with the library.

Denise will contact Betty Keim about doing something this fall.

Rick Buck offered to be a timekeeper at meetings to keep presentations from going too long.

We would like to try doing the presentation first and the business part of the meeting afterward, and try to keep the business meeting to 15-20 minutes if we possibly can.

Evan can send the detailed Treasurer’s report to Denise to put into the minutes, and just give a quick summary at the meeting.

We are hoping that Sunfest will generate interest in our Club, as it has in the past, and having a strong speaker and presentation at the June meeting will be something that we can talk about with visitors to our Sunfest booth.

Board meetings:

We decided to have quarterly Board meetings in July, October, January and April. For our July meeting, we decided to do lunch at Bambino’s. Date in July TBD. We are hoping that by having quarterly meetings, each meeting can be done during a lunch hour.