I hope all of our members enjoyed a great Holiday season. I wanted to start the year with a brief update on where we are as a BMW CCA Chapter for 2020.
In November BMW CCA held a meeting of all the Chapter Presidents and Treasures in Dallas Texas. At this meeting, many items for the future of the club as a whole were discussed that will have a profound effect on Chapter operations for the coming years.
The most monumental change will be the significant loss of chapter revenue paid by National to the chapters. We will lose about 45% of our income from National over last year’s amount. National justifies this by not requiring the chapters to issue quarterly newsletters to our members. Please believe me when I tell you that our newsletters did not cost us anywhere near 45% of our income from National. Instead, you will be receiving twice a year a new regional magazine with content solely supplied by the regional chapters. The name will be Bimmerlife!
This was done because the club BMW CCA has a net loss of over $800,000 in the last year. The largest part of that loss was caused by the club magazine Roundel. Like many other magazines add revenue for the Roundel has plummeted. National has decided to try to offset that loss partly by way of reducing the monthly stipends to the chapters. As a result, your board has been forced to consider how we move forward in the best interest of our members and to give you our members the best experience we can for 2020. Number one on that list starting an Auto Cross program. Presently we are working with the venue and the Porsche club to “piggyback” on their successful events. This is only until we decide if this is a viable option for our members. If we do decide to move forward as Sunshine Bimmers Auto Cross we will have to incur the expense of purchasing our own timing equipment and computer to run our events. Next, we decided to push the 2019 Holiday Party to January 2020.
You should have seen the posting on our Sunshine Bimmers Facebook page and Websites with details. You will be receiving an email invitation shortly. We decide to do this for two reasons. We wanted to wait until after the November meeting to be aware of just how much of our monthly revenue we were going to lose. (we never even considered that it would be that high) The second reason was that this year there was a very short window to host a party because there were only three weekends between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
That said the board and I will work hard to make 2020 a banner year for our members. I would like to hear from you our members with suggestions on what you would like. You can email me at robertziegler@msn.com with your ideas. I know I speak for your entire Sunshine Board in Wishing you all the best for 2020! Bob Ziegler, Sunshine Bimmers President
Remember it is not about the cars it is about the people