Thanks for coming. I made 25 copies of the handouts, so it will be necessary to share. Lena will post these documents on our web site so if you don't get a copy to take home you can print your own.
The blue document is our meeting agenda. The pink document is the minutes of last year's annual meeting. Orange is the proposed budget for 2010. There are three yellow documents which Adele and John Robertson will discuss.
This time of year its easy to get inspired by State of the Union and State of the State addresses and think that I have to say something significant. But nothing I say can be as significant as where I am saying it.
But as senior warden I do want to say something about the state of Holy Trinity. This has been a big year for Holy Trinity. Throughout this challenging year we managed to pay our bills and retain a full-time priest. We continued to provide Sunday worship, for ourselves, for our children, for Wildflower Court, food baskets to Head-Start families, support for a chaplain at Lemon Creek, youth group, and other ministries. The congregation of Holy Trinity Episcopal Church has persevered, even prospered... and now we are here.
And what a place to be... our temporary certificate of occupancy is good for six months, and should be renewable as long as we continue to make progress towards completion and as long as we don't violate the rules. We still have a little bit of money in the bank but we have a lot of unfinished building. We shouldn't expect to get much more completed with the funds we have on hand. But our Capital Campaign Committee is active and we do hope to get additional rooms completed soon as a result of fundraising efforts.
You should already know that the Rasmuson Foundation awarded a $500,000 "top-off" grant to our project. The terms of a top-off grant are that we have to show that we have secured all other necessary funding, so that the top-off grant is guaranteed to finish the project.
With the Rasmuson grant we are still approximately $400,000 short of the total funding required. I say approximately for several reasons – for one thing it is a moving target, with donations, pledge payments and invoices coming and going. For another thing our construction contract has a guaranteed maximum, but indications are that with some minor compromises we may get a completed building for less than that maximum. And finally, I spent my free time this week working on these words, and not on the numbers.
Since the Rasmuson grant is a top-off grant, we need to secure approximately $400,000 before Rasmuson will release funds. This is actually a good thing for our Capital Campaign, because donors like to know that their contributions will be leveraged, and in this case, when we raise $400,000, we can actually get $900,000.
But our financial circumstances are still more complicated.
We "forward-funded" the construction with loans from the Episcopal Church Building Fund and the Diocese of Alaska, for a total construction debt of $350,000. That is, we got this far by spending money that we don't have, and, we need to fundraise to repay the bulk of these loans, because our operating income won't support the debt service.
And the final complication on the construction budget side is that we have another grant request of $300,000 pending before the trustees of the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust. Our Murdock contact informs us that the trustees will consider our request on February 20, and also, that even a favorable might be a grant of less than $300,000.
So my summary of the reconstruction situation is that while our progress is exciting, we still have a ways to go. The funding situation is still complicated and uncertain. And our Capital Campaign Committee still has significant money to raise, with all that that implies.
The operating budget situation is easier to understand. We just spend more than we take in.
The Vestry has proposed an operating budget for adoption at this meeting. You may wish to follow along on the orange sheet as I point out some noteworthy aspects.
- income expectations are higher, particularly for pledges - $15,000 more than 2009 - 6 more average pledges
- anticipates $6,000 in rental income
- no budget for snow removal
- almost every category has been reduced, some to zero
- defers needed rectory maintenance
- rector compensation and insurance needs attention
But with rigorous budget discipline, and optimistic income expectations, we have achieved a balanced budget.
However, please note that reconstruction debt service is not in the operating budget. This budget assumes that ongoing fundraising will cover construction debt.
So here we are in the middle of a construction zone. We are almost out of money... but help is within reach. Our proposed operating budget balances only with the help of optimistic expectations and uncomfortable belt-tightening. But here we are. And this concludes my report.
At this time I would entertain a motion to adopt the proposed budget.
