2022 » 12 December 2022

DRAFT: WACD Operations for December 2022

The information on this page is intended for WACD members and partners.

End-of-calendar-year schedule

Ryan will be taking leave from December 22nd through the last day of December.

Tom will only be working part-time the rest of December as he has too much leave time accrued. WACD’s policy is use-it-or-lose-it, and the deadline to use it is December 31st.

Annual Conference & Business Meeting

WACD’s 80th-anniversary annual conference and business meeting were held November 28-30 in Wenatchee, Washington. See the conference page on the Hub for more information: https://wadistricts.us/annual/2022meetings/conference/

Ryan is working on survey results received from about 45 attendees. This is a higher response rate to a post-conference survey than we’ve seen before.

Staff are working on determining refunds for people who registered to attend in person but, for various reasons, canceled and attended virtually instead. Weather was a significant factor for many registrants and we heard some conversations going on about changing the conference date to earlier in November.

Ryan posted links to recordings for Tuesday (November 29) and Wednesday (November 30). The vendor who managed the sound system ran into technical problems on Monday (November 28) and is working to try to recover that recording. Find the links to recordings on the conference page under the Recordings tab.

After the conference, both Ryan and Tom were ill for at least a week.

We have the 2022-23 sponsors updated on the conference page under the Sponsors tab and in the widget at the upper right corner of the home page. We will create a collage of logos to include in the Five Things newsletter and there are a few other locations we need to update by the end of the year.

Priorities for Legislation & Budget

We published the 2023 Legislative Priorities just before the WACD annual conference. There was some modification of the priorities that arose from the adoption of particular resolutions and from discussion and decision during the annual business meeting. More to come on this.

With the release of the Governor’s budget, we learned of the proposed funding of riparian restoration work to the tune of $100 million. Find all data on the OFM website as well as a summary of proposed funding packages for the State Conservation Commission.

We are hearing that Representative Gregerson wishes to resume action on her conservation district elections bill, HB 1910. WACD members recently voted to the Conservation Commission’s proposal to advance the recommendations of the Joint Committee on Elections with the addition of financial reporting through the Commission. Click here to find WACD’s previous coverage on conservation district elections.

Website

The general public website at https://wadistricts.org and the member site at https://wadistricts.us were both updated this month. The “Five Things” newsletter archive for 2022 was updated.

Both sites started experiencing more down time in November 2022. We saw this same pattern in November 2021 as traffic increased due to the upcoming annual conference. Our website has already increased our cost to host the two sites because of the size consumed on their server. It may be prudent in 2023 to look for a new host for at least one of the sites.

WACD LINKS

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