President's Message – May/June 2005 To bring you current with the “behind the scenes” activity, the Board recently conducted its required spring board meeting via conference call.  The officers and board met for nearly 10 straight hours and accomplished quite a bit of board business; not an easy task considering the number of people participating and a time zone span from Oahu to New Jersey.   An effort was made to make the call even more organized than a face to face meeting, and a lot of planning took place beforehand to accomplish that.  Is this the way future BHCA boards might conduct their business? Can the BHCA enrich itself by making Board positions available to talented Board members who cannot travel and yet would like to serve?  Time will tell, but it certainly can be done and in a manner that gives everyone the opportunity to express his/her thoughts and probably at a bit lesser average cost per participant. There were actually some advantages since the agenda had to be formalized prior the actual call.  A standard guidelines procedure was developed to ensure the board kept from wandering and focused on each topic being discussed.  Jerry Rush had the difficult task of recording this meeting and a transcript is provided for your review in this issue of Tally Ho. Most board members also had their computer networks open during the call, and this made the viewing of documentation much easier and access to information free flowing with less paper flying around. This leads me to my next area of discussion and that is the committee reports.  As you will see in the Recording Secretary report, many of the committee chairs provided reports for the spring meeting.  Excellent suggestions were made and although some of them cannot be implemented at the present time, the door will always be open for communication.  We are certainly on the right track. Reports from committee chairs are required again at our fall nationals.  This is a face-to-face meeting and I encourage the committee chairs to contact Jerry for scheduling a time slot to meet with the board.  You should also feel comfortable contacting any of the BHCA committee chairs with suggestions or recommendations. Nationals Your Nationals plans can now include three great locations for 2005, 2006 and 2007.  St. Louis is coming up this fall.  Beverly Barringer-Ruggeri says she is once again ready to accommodate all Basset folks coming from all venues.  The hotel and nationals committee is dedicated to making your stay in Eureka a pleasurable one, and we all are truly looking forward to another successful nationals in MO. Nationals 2006: Gettysburg, PA.  In case you missed the beautiful rolling hills, the Teddy Bear store, the quaint shops, the elegant restaurants and the many historic sites and places to reflect in 2003, we are going back.  The very capable nationals committee headed up by Nationals Coordinator Anne O’Reilly (now considered veterans in hosting a successful and profitable Nationals) is busily making plans for 2006 in Eastern PA at the Holiday Inn and conference center.  They have many experienced volunteers to fill committee positions and excitement is rippling through their ranks, even though the events are a full year and half away.  Let’s give these good folks all the support they deserve. Nationals 2007: Pittsburgh, PA.  As Robert Opeka warmly points out, besides visiting the home of the Super Bowl Champion Pittsburgh Stealers, World Series Champion Pirates and the recent Stanley Cup Champion Penguins they will be able to add the 2007 BHCA Nationals to the city’s accomplishments.  Who knows we might even get a key to the city. Although some of you might feel that planning this far in advanced is a bit more than normal, the issues of site availability, hotel contracts, reservation rates, accommodations, and committee selections, make it more desirable for us to have commitments at least two to three years in advance for our Nationals.  Next, we might consider selecting judges 2 years in advance rather than one so that specialty clubs won’t be burdened with Nationals judging conflicts. Nationals 2008 and 2009: Both Texas and California have promised proposals and we look forward to receiving them.  Any other group wishing to be considered must advise BHCA as soon as possible. By Laws:  The board took a great deal of time reviewing the by laws, one section at a time, as presented by the by laws committee (Randy Frederiksen, Jerry Rush, Jean Sheehy), and after much deliberation returned them to the committee for further work.  Although the recommendations provided were very good, board members had a few new items that required further attention.  As I mentioned before, the by laws have not been revised since 1998 and have actually been in committee for several years.  Unless there are unforeseen delays, the committee and board still hope to have the by laws before the membership this year. Recently, I asked Corresponding Secretary Mary Ann Svizeny about the amount of correspondence she handles, and found that the traffic was astounding.  She culls through 70 emails each day along with questions that arise both from the membership and public that require her attention.  Annually she process’s nearly 3,000 pieces of correspondence or requests and this is during a slow activity year and does not include the membership roster.  For this reason we are looking more closely at the website as a communication tool which is presently under-utilized.  It is our hopes to be able to provide information quicker and more accurately to our membership and to the public.  After the various guidelines are finalized and put in standard format, it’s our intention to post them to the website.  Richard Nance is working the web issues and hopefully he will have a capable individual to take on the webmaster position in the very near future. We did update our Tally Ho computer and printer which was near five years old and added some new software.  Carol Hunt thinks the holidays arrived early and now spends 10 hours per day working the Tally Ho instead of the usual 14. As you can see your officers and board are grinding out the chores of the BHCA club business and wants the membership to feel comfortable in the new directions and somewhat visionary attitudes.   Give us a call, we like hearing from you. Warmest regards, Thad Makowski