8906-R1_MSA_November2024_Newsletter

From The Executive Board Secretary’s Report - Betsy Watson Central Region Directors Meeting - VFW - Madison, Maine - October 22, 2024

board to get a little more active on the trails. Then we had a really poor winter for getting g people out and about. I would continue to urge you to work with your local game warden and if you are not getting traction with your local game warden to go to the regional office and talk to the lead guy there and try to do a trailside safety check. Invite them to a function your club is doing, invite them to a regional meeting, interact with them so that they can interact with our riders. The end goal is making our trails a safer place for people to come and ride and recreate. Northern Region Vice-President: Nick Morrill: Not much happening in the northern region, most of the farmers are wrapping up harvest work. Leaves are almost all off the trees, there are snow flurries in the forecast, so the season’s not too far away. Clubs are starting monthly meeting, getting membership information out, still holding landowner appreciation dinners and functions, and out doing trail work. Just getting ready for the season. Central Region Vice-President: Ron Nunes: Everyone’s working hard. We are just waiting for the snow. Eastern Region Vice-President: Eileen Lafland Eastern region clubs are out and running. They’re getting their memberships in; they’re doing their trail work; they’re holding their club meeting; and they’re hosting their landowner suppers. They’re finding all those trees that were left over from last year and lots of water holes, even though it was a dry summer. If you plan on going to President’s Night, please let the office know how many presidents are joining us. We want to make sure we have enough food for everybody, and the MSA is picking up the tab for the presidents. Mark – the VPs in the Coastal and Western regions are not well. Gary Majors from the Western Regent had a spot of trouble. He’s been in and out of the hospital. Our prayers are with him. Matt Barron from the Coastal region has been in and out of the hospital with some health problems. Our prayers are with him too. Director of Operations: All Swett – The top priority is the Snowmobile Show. We need Volunteers to man the ticket booth, taking money and putting on the wrist bands. We need help on Saturday evening, Sunday morning and Sunday afternoon. So if anyone can help, we would appreciate it. The supper raffle is doing really well. Let’s talk about question 4. The 30 million dollars that we get if question 4 passes will help all trails existing. It’s going to help us with bridges and clearing brush. 25% goes to us, 25% goes to non motorized, and the rest of the money goes to the people on horseback and bicycling and so on and so forth. It’s a marvelous bill and the last two years have been horrible for us. This bill is going to help us out a lot. WE talked a bit ago about weight distribution on the trails. There a legislator in the county that wants to increase the weight on ATV / Snowmobile trails. Funding Committee: Matt Stedman – We had a call with our lobbyist James Cote, and Joe from the snowmobile program talking about the trails bond. This is a good opportunity for infrastructure work, all the devastation from the flooding and things like that. We are hoping to get that money to update bridges and culverts and surface material to really bring our trails back up to snuff so we can leave the rest of our money alone for winter maintenance. Then our lobbyists and Joe will work closely with us to see how it all works, how does that money get from the bond to the hands of the clubs. We are trying to make that pathway as simple and straightforward as possible. It will need to satisfy some requirements to make sure that people are using the money in the right way, but to try to streamline that process as much as possible so not to burden our clubs like the RTP style grant or something super, deep and obtrusive. We want to make sure that we can get this money and that it’s doesn’t take a lawyer to figure it out. Other funding information, you know from what

clubs spend on an annual basis versus what they get, we’ve got a $3 million gap. So we have a hole to fill in a tough economy. The first thing that happened last year that’s going to automatically get us some more money is a change to the gas tax. They tweaked it a little bit and that should provide the trail fund between $200,000 and $250,000 more for this grant season. That’s going to be a big help. We are working another bill to take sales tax from snowmobiles and provide a proportion of that to the trails fund. So give that money to Joe’s office to add to his grant program. The snowmobile program and the work of our volunteers put over $700 million a year into state economy. So how can we get some that money out of the general fund? Safety: Al Swett – I brought some safety stuff with me. Got a call from the teacher in North Anson and she wants to do a safety course. PPE is a big thing. So use earplugs and safety glasses. You want to be doing trail work in the right gear. Not sure if you guys have heard about El Nina, the weather phenomenal as compared to El Nino. El Nina is a complete flip from last year’s weather pattern, which favored a wetter South and a drier North. Weak La Niña events tend to allow for more snow in the Northeast, while snow is more limited during stronger La Niña’s because warmer temperatures often creep farther up the East Coast. So they’re saying this year is going to be a week La Nina which will mean colder weather and hopefully more snow. Mark – if you go to the show, to the vintage show, the MSA acquired a sled. It’s an older sled in good shape and we’re going to accept donations on that sled and for every donation that you make on behalf of yourself or a younger person you get a chance at that sled, and that sled on Sunday afternoon at 2:30 pm will be given away. Why I’m talking about it now is that all the proceeds go to the safety fund for the kids. So Al can continue his safety programs at the schools for the kids. Scholarship Committee: Barry Ryan: I’d like to give you a short report that Harvey just sent, He is the scholarship chair, I’m just the vice chair. We just turned over the CD to a new 12-month CD, short-term at 3.5%. At this point we would like to put a motion to the floor on our current MSA scholarship bank signing. We have three people on the account now. Two of those people are no longer associated with the scholarship fund. Currently, it’s just one person. Larry – We need to do some homework here or clean up some stuff? In the scholarship we have two people that are not active anymore. This is Sylvia Bridgman and Nancy Cooper. So we need a motion to remove them from the scholarship program. This needs to be done formally because the credit union needs to see copies of our minutes so they can see this in writing. In addition to that motion, we would add Barry Ryan and Mike Grass, Jr. to replace them and Harvey Chesley will stay. Eileen – Make a motion to replace Sylvia Bridgam and Nancy Cooper with Barry Ryan and Mike Grass, Jr. on the Scholarship Committee Credit Union’s list. This motion was seconded. All members were in favor, motion passed Membership Committee: Eileen Lafland: Membership have been rolling in nicely. I haven’t been entering them, so I guess Liz has been doing a quite a bit of work. I’m still working on the Rangeley’s 419 membership cards that were sent to me. I’m been working on them. I should be done by tomorrow. Family membership totals 1,540; 279 businesses, which totals 1,819 members at the present time. 73 of the 280 clubs have submitted memberships. Trail Committee: Brent Spalding: Communications are good because I got three independent notifications about the trail issue that Matt spoke about earlier. The clubs are awesome. We already have a solution to that issue. It drops 20 landowners to 4 landowners. There’s a little bit of brushing and a little bit of gravel work and the trail is going to be better than it was before so I’d just like to caution all the clubs. There isn’t a club in the organization that hasn’t had a landowner shut a trail down.

So take a breath. Sometimes it happened quite fast and other times it takes a bit but we solve this problem. The good this about social media is seeing all the great work that the clubs are doing. I have a workshop schedule for 9:30 AQM on Saturday at the Show. I’ll be starting out with a signage workshop and some Q&A. Joe Higgins will be starting around 10:15 AM and we’ve got him slated until 11:30 AM. Then following that, we’ll have the October Trail Committee Meeting Hall of Fame Chair: Gail Ryan: I’m still looking for someone from every region. I only have one right now from the Central Region. I have sent a symphony cards to Debbie Levasser, who lost her husband, Rick; to Ron and Lori Newman, who last a relative in Rhode Island. I sent get well cards to Jerry Major, Matt Barron, Kylie Roberts, Marion Pinkham, and Charlene McFarland. Hospitality: Gail Ryan – told us a great joke. LOL Old Business: Super raffle, Al already gave you that; The Epping Grass Drags – Done; Trail funding - Matt went over that. New Business: - Mark already touched on the December 1 st grant deadlines and I talked about trail safety checks earlier on, so I think we’re good. Question on the floor - “On the state website, they don’t show the first deadline for the capital equipment grant”. Matt – the capital equipment grant is not on December 1st, I’s June 15 th . December 12 st is the deadline for the municipal and club grants. Pot of Gold – Portage Lakers, not present. Motion to adjourn – all in favor Harvey Chesley, 207-314-0637 25 Hillcrest Dr, Clinton ME 04927 harv.chesley@gmail.com H ello fellow snowmobilers, thanks to all that visited at the Snowmobile Show in Augusta. We appreciate all the generous peo ple that stopped to buy a raffle ticket or even just to visit and hear more about the scholar ship and how much it helps support our fami lies. Many thanks to the committee members and volunteers that manned the booth over the weekend. Not only did the Alna snowmobile club volunteer a shift they also brought a $200 donation for the scholarship. With the holidays fast approaching it’s a good time to consider a donation to the schol arship fund, also the National Day of Giving is December 3. If you or you club is looking for a worthwhile cause look no further than our very own scholarship fund. The commit tee has set a goal of funding the two student awards from our savings account so that our newly invested CD will have time to build interest. We have had some very nice dona tions from fundraiser, 50/50 raffles and other events, with another push we are confident we can reach our goal. As always all of us committee members are more than happy to attend a club meeting, offer support on a fundraising event or just help out in way we can if any club would like to help with our efforts. Thanks for all the great work that has been done, we couldn’t do it without all of you. Here’s to a safe and healthy Thanksgiving. Scholarship Committee

T he treasurer’s report was read and placed on file at the office.. President’s (Mark Chinnock) opening comments: The biggest thing going on this week is the Snowmobile Show. In fact, it is coming up this weekend. The Vintage sleds are up to 125 sleds. We just got back from the Epping Grass Drags. It was an adventurous weekend because of the high winds. If you didn’t realize, the ITS maps are out. There is a case on the table over there. The Maine Guide will be coming out maybe this weekend. The supper raffle is the next thing. The drawing will be at the Augusta Civic Center on December 10th. We will be streaming live. How many people have talked to Joe Higgins from the Department of ACF? No one! Joe is one guy and he is doing both the Snowmobile and ATV sides. So he is pulling double duty. Joe gets like 100 calls a day that he’s going to have to deal with. Matt and I had a great idea and Joe is really excited with this. We have trail coordinators in each region and so does Joe. Not every phone call has to go to Joe. If you have any issues you will want to reach out to the guys on the piece of paper that was handed out to you. If they can’t reach an agreement, then they will elevate it. Deadlines – Everyone got their membership packets, one from the MSA and one on the grants from Joe’s office. You want to pay attention to those dates. In the packets from the MSA is a piece of information that is very important, the officer update form. It’s important because of the online membership. One of the questions is what does your club charge? If you don’t return the form to update the database then we have to charge an estimated fee and it probably not going to be as much as you charge. The next director’s meeting on November 19th, and we are bringing back president’s night. Its’ going to be at the Eastern Maine Snowmobile Club in Holden, 263 Levin Seller Road. The supper will be Roast Pork. Peter Ford made a motion to accept the Secretaries Report. Charlie Hunnington Seconded. All in favor, motion passed. Barry Ryan read the Treasures Report. Report was placed on file. Executive Vice-President: Matt Stedman – Most clubs have a Facebook page, it’s a great way to share information. One thing that bugged me a bit was one club that posed about a trail closure. The post had the landowner’s name on it. Personally I don’t think that is the right thing to do to call an individual landowner out for closing their property to a trail. I know it’s frustrating for clubs. Its great information to let people know that the trail won’t be the same this year and stay tuned for signage or reroutes or that there’s no trail to a certain place anymore. But calling someone out by name in a Facebook post and then gets shared who knows how many times, is probably not a good thing to do for the business of snowmobiling. It puts a sour taste in folk’s mouths. I definitely would not want to be called out like that. Trail safety check – Al and I had a meeting with If & W and the game wardens and got them on Betsy Watson, Secretary 207-205-1559 412 Roberts Ridge Rd, East Waterboro, ME 04030 watson.betsy29@gmail.com

6

b e r 2

e m

0 2 4 l M a i n e S n o w m

o v

N

er

i l

o b