ANNUAL MEETING, MEMORIAL BUILDING HARDWICK VERMONT JULY, 30 2015

PRESENT:
Monty Shatney, Board President
Kurt Bos, Treasurer
John Klee, Board member
David Mitchell, Board member
Emily Lanxner, Board member
Leif Goldberg, Executive Director
Stephanie Fraser
Diana Peduzzi
Mary Gagnon
Sherrie Olmsted

HCTV Annual Meeting

Annual meeting was opened at 6:33, the minutes from July 2014 were voted on and accepted.

Members voted in for two year terms were John Klee, Kurt Bos, Rachel Kane, and Emily Lanxner.

Leif presented the Annual Station Report, and touched on goals and accomplishments for 2015. Some of these include, creating better space and training for volunteer editing work, increasing collaboration with schools and non-profits, increasing use of social media to share programming, developing a regular program dedicated to birthday wishes, greetings or congratulations.

Community Comment
Diana said she was sad that Robin Grant had been let go, that he had always did a good job for Woodbury, Mary and Cheryl echoed the same feelings, they all thought that Robin should not been let go. Stephanie did not think Robin should have been let go after all of the years he had work at the station, and that he should get a severance package.
Annual meeting was adjourned.

HCTV Regular Meeting

The regular meeting was opened after the annual meeting.

The minutes from April 2015 voted on and accepted

The balance sheet was voted on and accepted

The profit and loss sheet was voted on and accepted

Station updates and personnel. It was voted and passed to advertise for a Production Manager, and to contract with Robin Grant on a as need bases for any IT issues as we need. We will be having a coin drop in August 2016 in Hardwick. Barb Howard had contacted HCTV about setting up an internship at HCTV for Hazen students. Leif had met with OSSU to discuss covering more community forums in the coming school year and indicated interest in covering more school board meetings. Leif had been contacted about the possibility of offering workshops for young people at HCTV and he is excited to work on this.

With no other business to come before the Board, we adjourned at 7:40p.m.

Respectively submitted
Monty Shatney

HARDWICK COMMUNITY TELEVISION BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETING MINUTES
MEMORIAL BUILDING, HARDWICK, VERMONT – APRIL 23, 2015

Present:
Monty Shatney, Board President Kurt Bos, Treasurer
Rachel Kane
Jon Lussier
Leif Goldberg, Executive Director
Robin Grant, Technical Director and Recording Secretary

Called to order at 6:18PM by President Monty Shatney
Monty moves the minutes, Kurt second. No discussion. Vote unanimous.
Monty moves the balance sheet as presented by Leif, Rachel seconds. No Discussions, Vote unanimous.
Monty moves the profit and loss sheet, Jon seconds. Monty asks about the increase in gross pay over this time last year. Rachel asks if the number of hours worked has increased. Leif says that is good because this is where our hours should be at this time. Rachel points out that payroll and equipment are higher than before. Leif says we spend about 1/4 of our equipment so far this year because we bought some lights. No further discussion. Vote unanimous.

Station Report:
Leif tallied up all the shows from 2014 for the VAN Annual Report. We’ve made about 10% more local shows than last year. There have been more shows in general, new programming going up a lot more often.
Leif has been working on Facebook, hired a friend for the same rate as Camera Ops, $50-fee. He’s been copying all of our website embedded shows to our FB page. He also looked at our website and got into WordPress, updated it and the theme, fixed some links, added FaceBook box to webpage to cross-pollinate. Another way to get our material out there. It’s just one more added step to changing the programming.
Covered all the basketball games this year, Robin did them all. At one game Robin and Tim tried to get a couple of students but they are all shy. Jon also points out that the rigidly enforced breaks in high school sports don’t give time for a color person to get a word in edgewise.
Monty tells Leif to feel free to get his friend back in if he needs more FaceBook tutoring.
The revenue form the WES and OSSU meetings has created $450 so far, another $400 to be billed, and even more coming. That’s more than $1000 more than last year. There’s one more OSSU to go before the end of that run.
Leif is doing the talent show, “5 Minutes of Fame’. In the past we’ve had volunteers that want to be in front of the camera. We’ve had a couple of calls from people we don’t know.
Leif reports on a meeting with Monty and Robin, the resolution was that Robin and Leif will meet more often. Robin was eager to come in to meet with Leif on Monday, only to forget that
Leif wasn’t there that week. Rachel asks about job descriptions and Leif would like the board to review them. Monty wants Robin and Leif to review the job descriptions and write down what they are actually doing with their time.

Technical Report:
Robin reports that he installed PrintCD on the MiniMac after hearing from Kurt that he had to reboot into OS10.6 in order to do so. The driver/software packages are in the MiniMac Downloads folder and can be put on any 10.7 (or newer) machine. Since Photoshop is now broken, Robin made a New Label Template that has the Meredith Holch logo and “Produced By HCTV” already on the disc when you open it, you then use Print CD to make your label (which sucks because there is not even one level of ‘undo’ on this software). One can still reboot into MacOS10.6 to use Photoshop.
The Office computer is slowly dying. Robin and Leif have had a discussion on merging the Office profile into the VMX computer. To do it ‘right’ the station needs to purchase software: QuickBooks, Office and PhotoShop. Robin and Leif have more to discuss on this front. Robin wants to offer the old 45MHz Dell to a PC vendor in town for parts.
Chad and Wendy Tanner are shooting a video with their daughter on Sexual Assault. This could be a huge thing, given the topic.

Agenda Item: Fundraising
Monty suggests the idea of the raffle like before, but only one prize of $500.
Rachel suggests TV Valentines where someone can out a message on a BBS page at a certain time of day. And Jon says we could do anything and do it year round. Jon also points out that there are dozens of fundraisers during Spring Fest, and we’d be just another one of those. For a small fee they can get a message out. Rachel says there could be a basic version for the set fee, add features for more. Jon would like an on-camera version where people can come to the station and record a message, they might not be so shy then… Birthdays, anniversaries, graduation is coming up. Rachel is starting her busy time, can we get this ready in time for graduation? Leif says we need a name and a set time of day when it’s aired. Robin says the easiest way to do it would be a PPT file exported to a QT file and put on the broadcast computer.

New Business:
Monty is no longer on the Select Board and by-laws state that one board member has to be in town governance. Leif spoke to Sherri Cornish who is on the board of the Town House and the Select Board, but she is really busy. He mentions the live feed down there that we almost never use. [Discussion on who is eligible. By-Laws are not clear, even the Weigher of Coal could be our board member.]
Monty asks if the meetings were to start at 6:30PM, would it be easier to get people there.

Old Business:
None.
Jon moves to adjourn, Rachel seconds, no discussion, vote unanimous. Meeting adjourned at 7:01PM

HARDWICK COMMUNITY TELEVISION BOARD OF DIRECTORS MEETING MINUTES
MEMORIAL BUILDING, HARDWICK, VERMONT – JANUARY 28, 2015

PRESENT BOARD MEMBERS:
Monty Shatney, Board President; Kurt Bos, Treasurer; David Mitchell, Secretary;
John Klee, Rachel Kane

PRESENT STAFF:
Leif Goldberg, Executive Director; Robin Grant, Technical Director and Recording Secretary

Called to order at 6PM by President Monty Shatney
Monty moves minutes of Nov 3, David seconds. No discussion.
Vote unanimous.
Monty presents the balance sheet. Looks good.
Moves to accept balance sheet as presented, John seconds. No discussion
Vote unanimous.
Monty moves to accept the profit/loss sheet as presented, John seconds. No discussion
Vote unanimous.

6:02PM
Station Report by Leif Goldberg:
There was a training session in January. Originally it was scheduled before the holidays, but there was not much response. So it was pushed into January. There were 8 trainees, a varied group, all ages, and some high school students.

[6:03 Jon Lussier arrives]

The goal was to get people familiar with the camera, and interest them in coming back. A couple of trainees have returned, a home-schooled high school kid joined Robin at the ball game [Robin says he did very well]. Another came in and did a Select Board meeting with Leif, and she was hired as a camera operator for the Woodbury school board productions. Leif wants to schedule a series of editing sessions with Robin. Only about 2 or 3 people per sessions given the number of editing computers we have and the small office space.

[6:05 Rachel Kane arrives]

A Father-Daughter team that was also at the training session in January has expressed an interest in doing the book readings at Galaxy Bookstore as their project.
We recently updated the software on the computers. Our old Final Cut 5 no longer performing certain critical functions has finally forced us to upgrade.

[6:07pm Nancy Kellogg arrives]

The OSSU meetings are in production, they are paying us for this.
Page 1 of 3 HCTV-­‐BOD Meeting Minutes -­‐ 2/2/15
The Woodbury School boards are paid for for the next four months.
Leif doesn’t like dealing with Facebook, would like to get someone else to do it. It is a tool for outreach, so it has it’s importance. It is suggested that we hire someone or go to the high school and have a student volunteer do it.
Leif would like to re-vamp the website this year, we have been talking about doing it, but never have. We use the site to live-stream and present everything the station produces, and also puts up for playback certain of our producers materials.
Rachel says that it would be more desirable to have a consistent person, if we use a high- schooler they would change often.
Nancy suggests Mary Gagnon who is recovering from surgery and spends A LOT of time on Facebook.

6:10pm
Technical report by Robin Grant:
Robin expands on the computer situation: The editing tower died, so we got a newer one, with an upgraded OS, and installed Final Cut 7 on it. Robin and Leif tested it and found that it worked very well and solved all the problems we had with FCP5. Since then Leif and Robin have installed the same OS and FCP7 onto the MiniMac and the VMX iMac. Robin mentions that the Office iMac will also be 10 years old this year and he and Leif intend to replace it as well. David Mitchell was a great help in replacing the BBS computer which also died this year. The equipment is holding up and doing well.
Budget:
There’s a new contractor line, they get $50 per shoot. The last years budgets say ‘assistant’ and has a zero, in the new version that line says ‘Independent Contractor’ and the amount spent last year was $200. For this year Leif put in $400. Monty asks about the revenue for these shoots, and Leif says that is reflected in the Underwriter line. We are getting $80 – $100 and paying the operator $50. Rachel likes the expanded programming because it adds richness to the station and doesn’t drain our resources.
Monty asks why the ‘repairs’ line went down? Leif says we’ve been replacing hardware rather than replacing it.
Jon asks about advertising budget line change. Leif says that it’s actually $500 a year, the twice-annual Gazette ads that we buy are just under $250 each, almost $500 a year and we get that all of that money back from Comcast. But the Gazette never billed us for the second one. Leif called them just at the end of the year to get that, but the checks were not processed until this year, so the second of last year’s ads are shown on this year’s budget.
Jon asks why our surplus is way less than last year? Leif says we were several thousand dollars under our payroll budget last year which provided a lot of that surplus and the proposed budget assumes full payment to the employees. Jon is just a little concerned at such a close- to-even-budget because he does not want have to tap the CD we have on long term deposit. Leif says we bought a lot of stuff this year, more than we had originally budgeted and we have not had to tap that CD, and yet we have even more money available than last year.
Jon moves to pass the budget as presented, David seconds. No discussion.
Vote unanimous.

Leif mentions getting someone to do the Facebooking. Jon says we could provide a stipend out of the web budget. Robin warns against re-allocating too much of the web budget because the site desperately needs to be updated. David says he is sure he can find a motivated student to take on the TV Station’s Facebook because Social Media is a huge part of new jobs and it looks good on resumés.

6:32pm
Fundraising:
Nancy suggests that we solicit donations for a small raffle at the spring fair.
Leif asked for a coin-drop from Hardwick, they said those are filled for this year.
Monty says that he checked in Woodbury about a coin drop and they said no. Apparently there’s no recent history of coin-drops in Woodbury.
Nancy was thinking more of a small raffle, one dollar tickets, on sale for a short period of time. Leif suggests a ’50-50′ raffle. And Leif reminds us all that it requires all of us to really get out there and sell a lot of tickets.
Monty asks about the amount we are trying to raise. Jon says that with the first year’s raffle we made something like $2200. Last year we only made $465, but there were many more give- aways. Jon says that’s an OK amount, but not for months worth of work. Rachel reminds us that, while we are getting more from the town this year, by doing a fundraiser we show the town that we aren’t solely dependent on their appropriation, that there is an active organization behind the station.
Rachel suggests a vote for a TV station animal mascot from one of the townspeople’s pets, where people vote with dollars. Leif likes the idea and mentions the MGM logo concept.
Rachel thinks that this can also bring people into the station, to find out what the latest numbers are.

6:45pm
Monty asks what our viewership is, Robin says that Comcast won’t tell us anymore. The last time we heard was right after Comcast bought Adelphia, and it was 435. He says that we can only guess our viewership by how much our income has increased over the years.
Jon suggests we put on a show at the Town House and split the gate with the performers, broadcast live and live-streamed the show.
Rachel likes the idea of a show. It’s a splash, for sure. But why would an act want to split the money with us? Robin suggests that we’d provide them a recording, as well as attention, but we’d have to have really good sound.
Jon suggests the Craftsbury Vibrations as an act to talk to.
Robin suggests a live telethon like he and Stephanie did last year for the Gagnons.

6:55pm
Other Ideas or Issues:
Rachel asks what our goal is for the fundraising? Jon says it would go to the Capital Fund.
We are a technical business and our stuff only gets older every year. He says the station has been doing more and more in the time he’s been in the board.
Jon mentions that the minutes were not on the site. Leif says that they had not been approved. Monty says that draft minutes can be put up, by all means do so.
Monty adjourns the meeting at 7PM.

Hardwick Community Television
Board of Directors Meeting
November 3, 2014
Memorial Building, Hardwick, Vermont

Present: Monty Shatney, President Kurt Bos, Secretary/Treasurer Leif Goldberg, Executive Director Rachel Kane Nancy Kellogg John Klee Jon Lussier Dave Mitchell Minutes (as taken by Rachel Kane)
Meeting called to order at 6:03.

Motion to accept the minutes of the July 31, 2014 meeting – made by Monty, seconded by Rachel. The minutes were corrected to include a discussion which had occurred on the idea of embedding HCTV videos into business websites, such as the Town of Hardwick website. A motion was then made to accept the amended minutes, moved by Monty, seconded by Jon. The board voted to accept.

Financial Report The Balance Sheet as of November 3, 2014 – motion to accept made by Monty, seconded by Jon. The board voted to accept, with little discussion. The Profit and Loss, with Previous Year Comparison, as of November 3, 2014. Moved by Monty, seconded by Jon. On a detail, Rachel thought that in future the Workman’s Comp insurance ought to be grouped with payroll expenses rather than with general insurance, to more accurately reflect the total payroll costs. The recommendation was made to do this on subsequent reports. Jon and others were pleased with the financial status of the station. The board voted to accept.

Station Report by Leif The station was asked by the Orleans Southwest Supervisory Union (OSSU) if we could tape and subsequently broadcast a series of 10 public forums which the OSSU has set up in the district to take place this fall and winter. Leif told Marina Groenewald, their communication coordinator, that we could not commit volunteer hours for this, but could do so if the forums had financial sponsorship, which has been arranged. They will pay us $80 per taping. The station will pay operators to film the meetings, unless volunteers turn up. The OSSU coordinator hopes to involve students with some of the filming. The first OSSU forum was being filmed this evening by a contractor, to whom we will pay $50. Apropos of sponsorships in general – the usual charge is $50, but with a lower charge if someone sponsors several events. Monty questioned why we should offer a lower rate at all, and Leif answers that he feels it is a good idea, as it increases support and involvement with the station. Monty is unconvinced. Some of the Woodbury School Board meetings are taped thanks to a paid sponsorship. The next volunteer training will be held in early December. Leif felt it would be a good thing to let volunteers know that, if they are competent enough, that the station might be able to pay them for taping/editing events, and this could be an incentive. The station aired Meet the Candidate interviews with the two candidates for the House seat, which received over 100 views, which was felt by all to be a good response, and something we should continue with in future.

Technical Report by Leif Several pieces of equipment have died or gone wonky recently. One of the editing computers died, and its replacement has just been installed. One of the external hard drives has been giving a lot of trouble too, but may be fixable. A smaller PC appears to have died, and this is the computer that controls the Community Calendar, so the calendar has not been up for nearly three weeks. Dave will see if he can fix this PC. The station was down completely for 2 or 3 days in September, due to a glitch at Comcast, and this was out of our control. Robin has not been able to put many hours in recently, and Leif worries that the station is beginning to fall behind in maintenance and repairs, and editing obligations. Monty will set up a meeting shortly with Leif and Robin to review hours and responsibilities.

Fundraising Jon says we might as well move on from the grocery raffle, which we have run for several years. The return and the effort no longer seem to be worth it. The idea of a coin drop was brought up again – Leif will investigate the idea with the Hardwick Town Manager’s office, and Monty will ask in Woodbury. Jon also suggests we tie our fundraising in with an existing event, such as Spring Festival. The board is encouraged to brainstorm, and bring ideas to our next meeting in January.

Other Issues Jon says that he is planning on filming all of the Hazen girls basketball games this season, and some of the boys games too. He is hoping to involve students with the taping and calling of the games, which would add some color to the game, and hopefully lead to these young people getting involved with the station. The board feels this is a fine idea. Monty moves we adjourn the meeting, seconded by Jon.

Meeting adjourns at 6:55