Chairperson's Report - May 2001

Happy Spring or is it already Summer? Some outrageous weather we've been having so far. Greetings from your Area Chair. 2001 has been so far a good year. There has been so much to do and so many exciting things happening since the last issue of the Pigeon. First, I want to thank everybody for their support and all the help given to me in our first quarter. I moved from Prior Lake back up to the cities in Minnetonka and it was very chaotic the week before the March Assembly. As many of you know, I wound up oversleeping that Saturday morning. It was the wrong week to have to burn the candle at both ends and I want to apologize to the Area for sleeping through my alarm. My thanks to the other Area Officers for picking up my slack.

Earlier that month, I had the pleasure of attending the West Central Regional Service Conference in Bozeman, MT. It was a pleasure to hear the other Delegates (as well as ours) talk about the upcoming Agenda items for the General Service Conference in New York. We had great representation from our Area despite the long distance to travel. Our Area's presentation on "Language of the Heart: Passing on Our Three Legacies", was tasteful and well done. You should have been there to hear Brenda take us back in time to the lobby of the Mayfair Hotel. It was incredible! I had the opportunity to attend several of the breakout sessions on Saturday and had a chance to hear some discussion on how other Area's handle their Reserve Funds. Quite a large number of them keep theirs in Certificates of Deposit or other investment vehicles just as the General Service Office does. There was also some great discussion on this at the Ask-it-basket session that afternoon. You can hear it all live on the tapes that are available through Dicobe Taping or ask me for mine. We also have a Regional Forum coming up in August over in South Dakota, which I know you won't want to miss. (See Area Calendar for details.)

For those of you that were there, you know we had a great turnout at the January Service Conference in Hutchinson. The new 2-day format was a success and hats-off to Brenda for putting together a great lineup of presenters. Eric is already working on next year's Service Conference to be held in Owatonna. Thanks to everybody in District 17 for volunteering their time to make it a success. 

At our last Area Committee meeting in Mankato on May 12th, the Area Committee decided not to renew our Certificates of Deposit. Although we felt that having them was a good thing (especially after hearing the discussion at the WCRSC), we decided that it wasn't worth it to have to go through all the discussion every time they came up for renewal. It seemed that they were a source of controversy that we didn't need to distract us from our primary purpose.

That is all I really have to cover at this time. I have put together a preliminary Calendar for 2002, which doesn't at this point include any holiday weekends and will start working on the 2002 Budget next. Just a reminder to all the committee chairs, get your budget revisions into me as quickly as possible to facilitate this process. Again, I want to thank our Area Officers and Committee Chairs for all their solid work, and I want to thank the individual AA members of Area 36 for your continued support. As always, anyone can e-mail me anytime with questions or concerns, at chairperson@area36.org. I will try to help in any way I can.

Yours in Love and Service,
Andy D.
Area 36 Chairperson