Minutes of the Board of Directorsof The

Minutes of the Board of Directorsof the

Iowa Extension Council Association

June 10, 2017

The Board of Directors of the Iowa Extension Council Association met in Ames on January 21, 2017. President Don Moore called the meeting to order at 10:00 a.m. Board members present include Don Moore, Kerry Aistrope, Pam Olerich, Lori Donahoe, Al Ralston, Mike Stocker, Michael Ryan, Jamie David, Jayne Lupkes, Judy Licko, Mary Greiman, Brian McNulty, Peggy Sparrgrove, Laura Sievers, and Charles Ertzinger. Also present were John Lawrence, Bob Dodds, Cindy Gannon, Terry Maloy, and Julie Baumler.

MaryGreiman moved to approve the agenda. Mike Stocker seconded the motion. The agenda was approved. Mike Ryan moved to approve the minutes from the January 21, 2017 board meeting. Jayne seconded the motion. The motion carried.

The treasurer’s report was given by Lori Donahoe. The balance in checking is $21,829.56. The savings balance is $1,107.21. The following bills were presented:

• JulieBaumler

Survey Gizmo (Sept. – May): $99.00

Business cards: $179.31

Web design and upkeep: $750.00

Printing: $110.10

• Whitfield and Eddy (for the remainder of 2016): $2,740.96
• LMC Insurance – liability for board members: $930
• Lori Donahoe– stamps: $9.80

Kerry moved to approve the treasurer’s report and pay the above bills. Mike Ryan seconded the motion. The motion carried.

Terry reported that Jayne Lupkes, Don Moore, PamOelrich, and CharlesErtzinger were all reelected to their board positions. Pam moved to approve the appointment of Jamie David from Taylor County to represent Region 18 for the term ending in 2018. Mike Ryan seconded the motion. The motion carried.

An ISU Extension & Outreach Update was given by John Lawrence, Interim Vice President for Extension and Outreach. He reported that the ISU Administration intends to begin the search for a permanent vice president in the fall, after the ISU president has been hired. The provost has been given some names for the search committee. John will likely be a candidate.

John reported that the Iowa Legislature held Extension and the experiment station harmless in their funding. ISU did receive cuts which will impact Extension’s budget by about $60,000. The mid-year cut impacted us by $23,000. We feel good about the impact of this cut versus how it could have come out. On the federal level, our funding was held flat in the president’s budget proposal. We may experience cuts on some of our grants like SNAP-ED and EFNEP. We still need to wait to see how it will come through Congress.

The Leadership Team had a retreat this week. There, they focused on Extension’s strategic plan relative to ISU’s strategic plan. Goal 3 in ISU’s plan talked about service to state, including specific measures for business and industry. We will be working on these over the next 5 years. They will be looking at contacts and other programmatic impacts. We will be developinga reporting system to help us track our progress on this goal. We will develop it within our IT group, but will hire new people to develop it (i.e. it won’t add to their current workload). Once it is operating, county staff will be asked to enter their information online so it can be captured and reported with the other aggregate data.

Iowa State’s Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with counties will be up in the next year. John proposed that the existing MOU be extended for a 2-year period of time. This will allow the new vice president to be on board prior to drafting something new. It would also allow us a couple of years to put together a committee and plan for the next one. He recommends holding the cost-share rate at 2.7% (the 2017 rate). He suggested that the background check specifications be reviewed, as well. John askedthe IECA board to support the extension of the MOU, look at a few items, have Whitfield & Eddy review it, and then help communicate it with the counties. Each individual county will need to make the decision to sign on (or not). The goal would be to complete the process by November so counties can plan for their budgeting at the beginning of 2018.

They are working on creating a template for an MOU between counties and fair boards, which would allow them to start a discussion about responsibilities. The template would be flexible to allow for differences in each county…but a written agreement is the end goal. There is a committee working on this which involves people from the state association of fair boards, people from FFA, extension council members, county staff, and state 4-H staff. The state fair association has district meetings in September, so we would like to have a draft ready by then to allow for their input. John encourages council members to attend district fair association meetings. We might try to have a panel discussion with representation from the different stakeholders. We might also invite some fair board members to our council conference next year. We think there are currently about 60 counties who have an MOU in place.

John will be attending centennial celebrations for several extension districts throughout the summer.

Bob Dodds, Asst. Vice-President for County Servicesgave a County Services Update. He shared the Corn Promotion elections will be held on July 18for Crop Production Regions 1, 3, 6, 9. If counties need help with staffing, they should let Bob know. It is very important that the office is open from 8 – 4:30 on that day.

The county bookkeepers met this week for training. There was great participation and good questions. Budgets for FY18 were entered. There will be some training on reporting out in the field.

Last year it was noted that there was an outlet/electricity shortage in the Beef barnState Fair. Last year there were 156 generators – and extension cords to go with them. This is a risk management issue. This year they plan to rent a couple of large generators with a service panel to accommodate over 400 drop cords. The fair board will no longer allow private generators to be brought to the fair. Counties may get phone calls from frustrated families. They will be working with electric companies to potentially rewire the beef barn in the future.

County insurance policy premium will actually go down just a little bit this year. Our claims went from being $1.41 for every $1 of premiums collected to $.35 for every dollar this year. We may have been lucky, but we also credit the risk management training that has occurred this past year. Offices will be receiving a walk-through survey to identify risk-management hazards. This is a voluntary activity.

The County Services finance team is taking training out to the counties as a follow-up from the council conference. The comments have been really positive.

There have been a few county staff members who have commented on the variety of titles out in the counties. This tends to cause some confusion. There is a small committee that will be meeting via teleconference in a step forward to discuss potentially standardizing some of the titles. This might also impact our liability insurance premiums, as the variety of titles contributes to the confusion or roles.

The board reviewed the extension council conference that happened in March. The feedback has been very positive. We ended up with over 100 participants. The board members did a great job of leading while there. The most common comment on the evaluations was, “we need more time.” The board felt they reached their goal of providing education to those council members who wanted to be more involved in their county process.

The financial report for the conference was reviewed. We had income of $10,345.00 (including $2,500 from County Services) and expenses of $8,915.00 for a net balance of $1,430.00. This will be nice seed money for a future conference.

In the future, we may reconsider having a keynote speaker, as the evaluations showed it was not asintegral as we thought it might be for a successful conference. That might be a place where we could save some money and also gain some extra time for sessions or other educational material. Council members were really hungry for more dialogue in the sessions. It might depend on our theme whether we can tie a keynote into the education. A lot of council members were surprised at how much they gained from the conference.

Additional thoughts and comments included the following:

• John noted that there might be a draw with a new VP for Extension the next time around.
• We might want to take the show on the road to reach more council members.
• We need to encourage councils to pay for the registrations so it does not need to come out of the council members’ pockets.
• Program selection might also be a topic that is “taken on the road” this fall.
• Program staff and county directors would have liked to have been invited. Though they were certainly welcome, we did not focus on recruiting them in our audience this year. We still want to focus on council members, but want to make sure other Extension staff members know they are welcome if they feel like they can benefit from the content.
• Councils are starting to talk more about budgeting for professional development
• It was nice for council members to be able to talk with other council members from other parts of the state.
• Bob noted that the regional directors who were there enjoyed the day and were impressed with the agenda.
• Length of sessions – balance between short enough to keep their attention and long enough to have the content mostly covered.
• Encourage council participants to take back their knowledge gained at the conference and share the topic with the full council.
• Bob’s support –both financial and encouragement - was important to our success.

The board discussed whether we would like to have a conference annually or biannually. Charles moved to continue with a conference in 2018, giving Julie and Terry authorization to lock in a date. Al seconded the motion. Julie will focus on looking for dates in March and April.

Advice and observations were shared by outgoing board memberKerryAistrope. She noted that it is important to continually learn and observe. This is important work to make a strongIowa.

After lunch, the 2017-2018 Board of Directors was called to order. The following officers were elected:

President: Don Moore

President-elect: PamOlerich

Secretary: Mike Ryan

Treasurer: LoriDonahoe

Board Process Issues were reviewed and discussed. Mike R. moved to allow board replacements to vote and to clarify that the replacement should be another council member from the region. Mike S. seconded the motion. The motion carried. Mike R. moved to approve the remainder of the Board Process Issues as they stand. Mary seconded the motion. The motion carried.

Jayne moved to move IECA funds from Wells Fargo to Veridian Credit Union and combine all of our accounts into one account. Mary seconded the motion. The motion carried.

The following committees were appointed:

Finance, Policy, & Legislation

Jayne – chair

Charlie

Lori

Human Resources & Member Services

Mary Greiman - chair

Mike R.

Al

Brian

Communication & Networking

Laura – chair

Mike S.

Jamie

Peggy

Judy

Absent board members will be appointed to a committee of their choosing.

The committees met and reported back. The Finance, Policy, & Legislation Committee did some budget planning. They suggested a budget equal to the projected dues and EAP income for the year. Mike S. moved to approve a $32,000 budget. Judy seconded the motion. The motion carried.

They would like to encourage councils to continue working with their legislators by offering the Public Leader Contact program for fall 2017, similar to what we have done in past years.

Legislative Day 2018 will be either Feb. 28 or March 14, depending on when we can set our extension council conference. We will work to improve the communication about the 4-H part of the program. However, the committee does recommend continuing to include 4-Hers again.

Potential legislative items to work on this year, depending on the political climate are pushing back the fiscal report deadline of Aug. 1 to Sept. 1 and also looking into the council vacancy election law.

The Human Resources Committee reported. They discussed background screening, including the frequency of re-screening. Some counties would like a recommendation of more frequent re-screening, while others prefer less frequency. The committee would recommendstaying with 3 years for rescreeningat this point.

The committee recommended that the association considers getting some new bids for screening, as one board member has heard some dissatisfaction. This would allow us to make sure our bid is competitive for the service provided.

The board discussed whether Department of Human Services (DHS) screening is something that we should consider recommendingcouncils do for all volunteers. First Advantage cannot do this screening for us, as it is not public information. The screening they offer would capture a criminal conviction if it was filed based on DHS investigation. However, it would not identify founded abuse that did NOT result in a criminal charge. DHS has to run all of the checks and does it in house with a typical 2-3 week turnaround. They would return either a “yes or no” answer, without any additional information about the case. There is also a question of how you would handle positive results on existing volunteers and staff. John Lawrence has formed a task force to look at the entire process of working with all volunteers – tracking, training, screening, etc. This is something that they may wish to consider recommending. The board took no action at this time.

The Communications and Networking Committee reported. They took a look at the role of county liaisons to the association. They made a few slight adjustments to the liaison job description. Julie will send out a message to board members listing the county liaisons and council chairs. Board members could also start sending a short email with a few key points to liaisons after each board meeting

Terry noted that he is available to come to regional or council meetings.

Julie reported that so far 58 counties have paid dues for 2017-18.

County concerns/issues were discussed. Don reported that a county was looking for some wage information for typical OA wages, but had a hard time finding anything. Bob suggested that a better comparison would be to seek out typical rates in each individual community. He also noted that regional information might be a good comparison – making sure that benefits are noted so it is a fair comparison. Jamie also shared that local Iowa Workforce Development offices also have wage information.

Al noted that using conference services for registration services for county events has been tricky, given the cash flow between event expenses and registration income. Some suggestions were given for different processes that may put the county in a better cash-flow situation, as conference services cannot send registration fees to counties until the books have been closed on an event.

Mike S. moved to approve board member travel expenses of $1,129.25. Al seconded the motion. The motion carried.

The next meeting date was set for Sept. 30.

Mike R. moved to adjourn. Mike S. seconded the motion. The meeting was adjourned.

Respectfully submitted,

Michael Ryan, IECA Secretary