District Camporee...to have or have not

[Eagle Foot]

As part of the District Camping committee our DE informed us that if we did not have a budget we would not be allowed to hold a District Camporee. I am with the understanding that if the local troops wanted to have a camporee without funding from the District we could.

 

Just to put things in perspective she...said that she was holding up pathes to the troop (Camporee Chairmans Troop) from the past Spring Camporee untill the Camporee Chairman turns in the budget from the past Spring Camporee.

 

I could use some clarifacation on this.

 

Edited by Eagle Foot

[scoutldr]

Sounds like, as a last resort, she is playing hardball. Any district or council activity needs to have accounting of the funds collected. The event planner needs to submit a budget which outlines expenses and expected income. At the end of the event, the books need to be reconciled so that there is a record of where the money went. This is not unreasonable, and is probably necessary in order to comply with the laws of non-profit corporations.

[Eamonn]

I of course have no idea of how things work elsewhere.

When I was District Chairman (Was that really only seven months back?) Every year the DE would receive a stack of budgets from the Council Service Center. A budget for each and every District Activity.

These showed last years numbers and any money that had either come in or gone out to date. The DE and the District Chair had to sign off on each and every budget.

Districts do not have any money. Or maybe I should say that Districts are not supposed to have any money.

Some events didn't change that much from year to year, so we didn't bother bringing them to committee for approval.

We never really spent very much time on them, but did quickly go over them at the District Meeting.

This was more as a reminder to the Committee Chairs that no event was ever allowed to run at a loss. Which when you don't have any money to start with only makes sense!!

To date our Council does not ask or demand that events make a set percent for each event.

Some Councils have what I see as a Council Tax on events. I ran into this when I was covering Day Camp Budgets at NCS. The Council adds as much as 20% to the cost of the camp to help cover some thing?

We never had a problem with budgets.

At District Camporees, we would order the patches through the Council. But the organizer of the event normally had a fair amount of out of pocket expenses. He had to turn these in if he wanted to get paid.

Making sense of the budgets that Scoutnet has in its system is really hard.

I found all sorts of things wrong. I tried talking to the Council Bookkeeper, who blamed everything on Scoutnet. So I brought it up at a Executive Board meeting. The Council Treasurer thought I was joking, when I said I had budgets that were so flawed it just wasn't funny.

I faxed him 68 pages.

We had budgets that showed we had made $1,600 on the District Dinner -Not bad considering we hadn't had one for two years!!

Day Camp had lost $2,600 when we had added a water line!! -We used the property owned by a local community fair at no cost and the $500.00 Donation that the Lion's Club made to help pay for Camperships wasn't listed.

The SE of course blamed the book keeper.

Each and every District does need to have someone who is willing to keep an active eye on the District Budgets.

I sometimes wonder if the budgets are hard to understand by design?

Last year when we were singing the finical blues as a Council, I tried to make sense of somethings. It isn't easy. Everyone was blaming Summer Camp for losing $60,000.

I couldn't break down the camp staff pay, this goes in with all the other salaries for the entire paid staff.

I did notice that we had spent $30,000 on awards.

No one else caught this. (One bad thing about having non-program people on the Board) and were willing to let this go through.

It turned out that someone had placed all the T-shirts that had been bought to sell at camp in the camp budget and the shirts had been placed in as awards. Because of finding this we went over the camp budget very carefully and found that the camp did lose money, but the $60,000 was brought down to $9,000 ($6.00 Per Camper) The camp fee was raised by $25.00.

When we are dealing with other peoples money I think we need to be extra careful and very open.

We need to do this at every level.

When there seems to be any sort of secrecy or hint of a cover up, people lose trust.

Even in the Ship we have books that anyone is welcome to come and look at and ask questions about, in fact I welcome it. When they see how poor we are I can hit them up for a donation!!

Eamonn.