I would like to start by thanking you all for the opportunity to continue on as the President of this Club.  I ended up in this role as the interim President in June last year, when Brian Day needed to step down. So thank you for your vote of confidence.

My mandate is to advance the club, and improve it through new growth of members, and more defined trails I want to set the ground work to keep this club alive and active so that this club will be here for many years to come.

As many of you know by now, we held our AGM on Feb 9^th and we discussed two major issues.   The first was a discussion on the option of joining the OFATV, and the Second was to elect the new terms Officers.

I would like to start by saying thank you to Dave Dwyer, who stepped down at the AGM, for his work as our past Vice President of the club, and his agreeing to continue supporting our website.  I also want to welcome back Brian Day who is working for you as a Director, and has accepted the task to get our trail maps redone in a more professional way. I also want to welcome Cory MacSweeny as a new member of our officers in the role of an appointed Director. 

Rob Meester stepped up as our new Vice President, John Meester was re elected as our Secretary Treasurer, Bob Douglas is our Trail Supervisor and 2nd Vice President and Eric Blackmore is still with us as a Director.  You are all shining examples of a dedicated volunteer group and I look forward to our up coming year of working together.

Now back to the OFATV discussion. After a record year of members in 2006/2007 we thought that things where looking up for our club with close to 300 members signed up, and a rather rough year behind us.  We where looking forward to being in a good position to move the club to a new level with enough cash flow to do some badly needed trail work.

As this new season progressed, we found that many of the members did not renew their memberships for various reasons, and this started to cause us some concern about the future of the club.  We looked at the money in the bank, the fixed costs of running the club, and realized that with out some drastic changes, we where looking at a negative bank balance at the end of the season.  We knew we had to do something, and fast. 

The OFATV had contacted us in the late fall, wanting us to come back to them, and our first thought was that there was no way,   we have been down that road, and we did not like the way they ran the business. Bruce Murphy, the new President of the OFATV, assured me that they had revamped the whole model of how they ran and that we would be surprised if we gave him the chance to prove it to us.   We reluctantly decided to set up a meeting and hear what he had to say. I have to say we all walked away from that meeting rather impressed, and viewed this as a solution to our long term survival of this club.

We conducted several meetings to discuss this, and we felt this was the best option for the club. At one of the meetings we held, we felt that we should go ahead with this plan,  we knew that we could make the decision on our own but we felt that we should get the feeling of our members before we moved forward with this plan.  We decided that the AGM was a good place to get this information to the members, and ask for their endorsement to move forward on this.

We had a near unanimous decision from out members to give the directors the mandate to follow through and join up with the OFATV.   We choose to use this decision by the members as a confidence vote and allowed us to make the decision knowing that our members are behind us.  

I’m pleased to announce that in a meeting shortly after the AGM, the officers of the club, unanimously voted to move forward with the affiliation into the OFATV.  

As of March 1^st, we will be an OFATV affiliate club.   There will be a lot of work to do to make this happen, and I’m happy to say that the directors are doing their parts in making this transition as smooth as possible.  The OFATV has been superb at answering all of our questions, and are working with us in order to get this transition done as smoothly as possible.

We are going to have a lot of work to do in getting ready and your help will be required.   We have to get our trails marked, and groomed and ready to show.   We have new signs that will need to be put up through out our trail system, we have land owner agreements that need to be renewed, and new land owners contacted for permission to expand our trails to reach out to our neighboring trail systems.   We will soon be asking for volunteers to come out for work weekends.   This will be done on our web site and our forum.  Bob Douglas is looking to widen most of the trails and in doing so will be looking for help to groom the existing trails and cutting new ones where needed.

I feel a renewed vigor in our directors, and I want to pass this on to our members.   We want you all to be proud to be part of the club, and if you can spare a few hours here and there to help out, we can create a better trail system for all.

I also want to make note that there where several members at the meeting that have offered their help with different tasks, and with this help, we will accomplish some great goals.   We truly appreciate all the help that we receive.    We all pay a membership fee, and we all are members of this club.  With out volunteers, the club comes to a halt.

There will be lots of news coming down the pipe as we move forward with the OFATV so we encourage you all to keep in touch with out website, and our Forum to keep abreast of all that is happening.

Thank you again for your continued support of the Johnstown ATV Club.

Let’s make this a year to remember. 

Rodney Hurlbert

JATV Club President