However, on the pools issues, not only is this a matter of which pools they decide to open, but also how they schedule them. Open swim hours at CA’s pools have been declining in recent years, and I suspect it may be even more constrained this year.
But a closer look at both of those issues will likely have to wait until next week, so I wanted to share some budget bits and pieces for you first.
Revenue
President's Letter
There’s a statement in the President’s “Transmittal Letter” that is carefully worded and, if you can capture the subtext, pretty powerful: “We believe it is safe to say that there will not be a return to “normal”, if “normal” means a pre-COVID CA. Likely, in three to four years, the maturation of a “repositioned CA” will become evident, endowed with an organization-wide commitment—Board and staff—not to wait for a global crisis to peel back and scrutinize the functionality and efficacy of the many layers of CA that have accumulated over 53 years.”In my notes, I wrote “wow” because I believe this is as strong a statement as I have seen from CA about the reality that is ahead for the organization as well as a critique of how it got here. For much of its history, CA was happy to take on roles and responsibilities that had tenuous or unclear connections to its mission, and over the years, this all started to add up as the baggage that it had to carry (or, in the parlance of the letter, accumulated layers). It cannot rely on the steady revenue growth it had once enjoyed due to the growth of its assessment base, and in the next few years it will be making many difficult decisions.
This profound transformation is partly behind why I decided to write this blog: If we don’t pay attention throughout this process, we may lose parts of Columbia and CA that we all thought were fundamental.
One other item about the President: Most budgets are pretty dry, but this includes the following bullet in it's "Budget at a Glance" section and I want to highlight as a reminder that this budget--and institutions like CA, more broadly--are made up of people, working together and (usually) trying their best to achieve a common goal. This item pulled back the curtain on the dry formality of the budget to let in a little humanity and I love it.
Pictures
Communications and Marketing
I’m a little biased about this but I find this re-org of the Communications and Marketing division somewhat confusing. If anything, CA’s marketing of its memberships has been fine—surely you see as many digital ads for the gyms and golf courses as I do—but its communications have been not so good. Indeed, I think the lack of strategic communications expertise (or the undervaluing of it) has led to a bunch of CA “own” goals over the last year.All that said, I hope that with all these new positions in “Branding and Marketing” CA will finally start to think about the “Columbia” brand in addition to its own (they are more related than CA would like to believe).
Sports and Fitness
Sports and Fitness is poised to lose money pretty much across the board. The Columbia Gym is budgeted to “earn” about $141,000, but this is largely because of how membership revenue is allocated across the different facilities. None of this is news.
Community Services
Did you know the Horse Center is housed in the “Community Services” budget? Why not sports and fitness? CA has a new operator but the lease revenue is considerably less than it was last year and the year before ($9,000 vs $16,000 in FY19 and $15,000 in FY20).CA’s community grants budget is zeroed out. Compare that to almost $1 million in FY19. In less than two years, CA’s grants to community non-profits have dropped by $1 million. This is huge and an under-appreciated aspect of CA pulling back on its community focus.
While this budget line is less than 2% of CA’s spending, the impact on the nonprofits losing these grants is much bigger. For some organizations, these grants represented significant (20%+ of their annual revenue) and funded important community programs. As we look ahead to a year when “programming” will return, there are going to be many non-profits struggling to do what they were once able to without this support.
At the same time, however, CA has budgeted its own return to programming in the form of it’s Lakefront Festival (not to be confused with the Columbia Festival of the Arts' "LakeFest"). This is a more complicated matter than I can get into on a “bits” blog post, but briefly: Downtown Columbia is crowded with organizations and programs and the overlap between them has caused unnecessary strife and expense. There have been conversations about a more “collaborative” lakefront programming paradigm—one in which existing non-profits, CA, and the community can all benefit—but there is no indication of any action on that front in this budget.
But, as with everything in the budget, it is all subject to change! CA’s Board will host its first worksession on the budget tonight at 7 pm.
From CA’s Facebook page, here are the details:
Read agenda and packet: https://bit.ly/31Qi3iZ
Participate in Resident Speakout: https://bit.ly/3mtqN6s
Watch/Join meeting live on YouTube: https://youtu.be/W_a5veyf6_8
