Hello all! I hope you made it through Thanksgiving unscathed and didn’t break your rigs or get stuck too bad. Unfortunately, I caught a head cold and have been on the road to recovery, however, without a voice. I’m sure there are some that are happy with that but slowly, it’s coming back but unfortunately, I am not ready to do a video update along with this written report.
 

Board of Directors Meeting

A lot has been going on since my last update! We had our quarterly board of directors meeting a couple of weeks ago in Sacramento at our office and got a lot accomplished! We tried to get it done in a day but sometimes, like this meeting, we ended up working Sunday for a few hours to finish the long list of items that needed to be discussed and worked through. Again, I have to thank my board of directors for their awesome work before, during and after the meeting and without these rockstars, I’m not sure how we could have handled everything that was on our plate.

Upcoming Request for Proposals

In the coming weeks, you will be seeing Request for Proposals (RFP’s) for the webmaster position and In Gear editor position. Suzy has decided that retirement is more important than us and decided it’s time to enjoy the finer things in life, like camping, Jeeping and grandchildren and maybe her cats. Not that I blame her and often think about retirement myself but I have a few more years before that happens.

The BOD and I have been working with Suzy for a hopefully a seamless transition but as we work more into this, we are finding a slew of loose ends that haven’t been tied up for quite a while throughout the association. Luckily, I was able to get a committee formed to help resolve all this mess and have enlisted the help of Past Presidents Robert Reed, Dave Douglas and Don Spuhler, who have been awesome to work with and step-by-step we’re getting this all fixed up, so to say. I’ll have some more information on this soon and some other news on how we plan to streamline some of the operation in house and take a metric crap load of work off our office staff and current/future contractors. This has not been easy and continues to grow daily as we work into this, but I am confident that my committee and I will have some great suggestions to bring to the BOD and get all of this taken care of, sooner than later.

Win-A-Jeep program

At the BOD meeting we approved the purchase of next year’s raffle vehicle and personally, I’m excited to see what direction we end up going. Our current Raffle Vehicle Chairman Chris Silveira has done an awesome job with the last two vehicles and has been working behind the scenes working on a master builder and sponsor for this new vehicle. The BOD and I have been tersely working on getting Chris to take on this job for one more year but there has been some resistance with excuses like work, family and other cheesy cop-outs so do us all a favor and let Chris know how great of a job he’s doing and how excited you all would be for him to take on one more year! Or two but don’t let him know about that just yet, concentrate on this upcoming year for the time being. In all seriousness though, thank you very much Chris (and his wife, Jessica, who probably does most of the work) for all your hard work and sacrifices to bring this incredible Win-A-Jeep to life. As you all read this, you should have gotten the annual Win-A-Jeep mailers with tickets for you to purchase and send back to the office.

Since the last BOD meeting there hasn’t been too much going on other than a great time I had with my club in Salton Sea where I ate too much, caught a stupid head cold, did some incredible off-roading, saw my middle daughter turn 12 and overall had a great weekend of some much need relaxation, well, until that stupid head cold deal got a little worse and slowed me down a little, which put me farther behind.

Red Rock Canyon

Last week, we had a joint Zoom meeting with our friends over at CORVA regarding the Red Rock State Park issue going on now. The meeting was a joint venture between Cal4Wheel and CORVA, which invited other organizations from all over California and Nevada to work on a plan to fight the proposed closures in the area. I have to say, I was impressed by the immense amount of information to come out of this meeting and was pleasantly surprised how well we all worked together during, and even continuing after the meeting. This is a huge deal for us here in the south and should be equally important to everyone all over California. For a few hours, everyone worked together and presented facts about the closures and how we can work together to fight this. I have been saying this for years and I’ll say in again here, we are stronger in numbers, we are stronger when we work together and if we can continue to work like this moving forward, I am very excited to see what we can accomplish working together, rather than working against each other. I’ll keep you posted with any updates and I’m also sure there will be something coming from our very own Rose Winn regarding Red Rock State Park as well.

There will be a time coming up very soon where I’ll be asking all of you, people you know, your neighbors, friends of friends and so on to sign and write letters opposing these closures. I get asked all the time, “What can I do to help?” Well, this is it. We need one, large, unified voice and this is the first step of many to do what we do, keep public lands public.

There was a tremendous amount of information provided in this meeting and I am beaming with excitement for how we put all this together and even more excited for the future of land use organizations working together.

Working together is what we need to do. This is what the other side of the fence has been doing for years and you can see how much land we have lost to this -- this is the time to put down your distaste for other land use organizations and let’s fight together!

In closing this update, I hope you are all healthy and stay that way throughout the holidays and are hip-deep in doing whatever you do that makes you happy. From my family to all of yours, Happy Holidays!

‘Til the next update…