A meeting of the District 11 (BCARES) Board of Directors was held on Monday, 8 April 2002. The normal meeting room at the Boulder Public Safety building was unavailable. Thus, the meeting was held at Ball Bros company in Boulder. The meeting was called to order at 19:00 by Jim Kubitschek, chairman.
The following board members
were present:
BARC -- Jim Andrews,
LARC -- Pat Lambert,
RMVHFS -- Len Koppl,
At Large #1 -- Dale Scott,
At Large #2 -- Pete Goldman,
and At Large #3 -- Jim Kubitschek.
Absent were: OEM -- Larry Stern & BCSO -- Chuck Pringle.
Also in attendence were alternates and/
or comm. chairs: George & Doshia Kretke, Mike Borenstein and
Grant Killey.
The minutes of the 11 Feb. meeting were approved.
QSL.NET: The donation of $100 has been sent to QSL.net to help support its www activities.
LARCFEST: Pat Lambert announced that he set up a table at the recent LARC swapfest to promote District 11 (BCARES). Several members from District 11 (BCARES) and surrounding counties assisted Pat at the table. One new potential member from Boulder county was recruited along with two others for neighboring ARES districts.
146.76 RPTR: Mike Borenstein announced that the Gunbarrel repeater is up and working again. The hard line has not yet been replaced. The county radio techs are waiting until they will also be replacing a lot of other coax & hardware on the tower.
RED CROSS: George Kretke reported that the Red Cross no longer seems to want to work with District 11 (BCARES). Due to a change in their leadership, they now only want to use their own trained personel. Because Randy & Kit Cassingham recently expressed an interest in working with the Red Cross in preference to District 11 (BCARES), George has refered Randy to contact Red Cross directly. Discussion was held as to whether District 11 (BCARES) should severe our ties with Red Cross. George and Len strongly discouraged this due to the fact that we do have an operational HF station at the local Boulder Red Cross building and the Red Cross has not indicated they want us to leave.
HOSPITALS: Doshia Kretke reported that she had been contacted by Longmont United Hospital. They had planned to run an emergency preparedness test tomorrow (9 April) and wanted District 11 (BCARES) present for the test. The test has just been postponed for a week due to problems with QWest's service. Doshia has been playing phone tag with her contact at Boulder Community hospital. Jim Andrews reported that he had received a phone call today from the plant engineer at Avista hospital. They are building a new large addition to the hospital and needed to replace and relocate the pair of District 11 (BCARES) antennas. Jim meet with him today and gave him recommendations on what to purchase and how to install it. They will call us in to test the antennas after they are reinstalled. It should be noted that at the present time, Avista has no operational antennas.
TRAINING: Pat Lambert announced that the MCOM (ECom - pl) material, rel. 2 will be released soon. It contains new material on de-briefing. It will be found on www.w0ipl/ecom. ( http://www.w0ipl.net/ECom/ - pl)
LONGMONT FIRE: - (Longmont EOC - pl) Pat announced that the Longmont Fire dept. still has a $6.5K line item in their budget identified for District 11 (BCARES) equipment. This was a funding request for federal 9/11 terrorist funds. Jim A. cautioned that his contacts at the Sheriff had indicated that the likelyhood of any Colorado agencies getting any of these funds were very slim. The Sheriff's request far exceeded the total amount that ended up being allocated to the entire state of Colorado.
EQUIPMENT: Pete Goldman announced that he has put in a lot of work recently reworking and repairing equipment. He has now resurected two old, dead thermal printers. He did this by removing their shorted NiCad batteries and replacing them with voltage regulators. He has also completely retuned the Sheriff's com van packet set so that it functions normally again. Pete asked what happened to the extra lap-tops that had been recently donated? (note: 4/10, Pete found the lap-tops buried in the storage closet). Pete also asked "What should we do with the massive amount of old, used video tapes? Jim A. volunteered to look them over and salvage the hi-8mm tapes.
LOUISVILLE & LAFAYETTE POLICE: Dale Scott announced that he has prepared promotional literature about District 11 (BCARES) and has e-mailed it to our contacts in these depts. He is now trying to arrange for in-person meetings.
BROOMFIELD POLICE: Jim K. and Dale announced that they recently had a meeting with Larry Arndt of the Broomfield Police Dept. They recently had a complete communications failure for 2 hours in their new building. Because Broomfield recently split off from Boulder County and created their own city/county, ham radio ARES support has been in limbo. The Adams county ARES has not been able to step in to take over. Their is no ham ARES organization of the 80 hams in Broomfield, nor any interest on the part of Broomfield hams. The Broomfield police literally begged District 11 (BCARES) to step in and provide them with ARES service. In addition the Colorado ARES chairman, ( Section E.C. - pl) Mike Morgan (N5LPZ - pl) has requested that District 11 (BCARES) also cover Broomfield County. (Mike, N5LPZ asked that District 11 (BCARES) include Broomfield - pl) Jim A. expressed concern that we first need to have Boulder County's blessing. He encouraged chairman Jim K. to first contact Lt. Larry Stern of OEM to determine Boulder County's position. It was felt that if we do help Broomfield, we need to negotiate a formal MOU. Len Koppl volunteered to be the liasion with Broomfield. Jim K. said that in the meantime, he had informally assured Larry Arndt that if Broomfield has a problem in the near future, they can call on District 11 (BCARES) thru the Boulder Sheriff's 911 dispatch center and we will help them.
BY-LAWS: Grant Killey raised the issue of "Why weren't we addressing the needed changes in the by-laws in tonite's meeting as promised at the Feb. meeting?". Jim K. agreed to set aside a meeting in June that would be devoted solely to revising the by-laws.
BARC: Jim A. announced that he had been asked to give a presentation on District 11 (BCARES) at the next BARC meeting to be held 16 April.
BOULDER POLICE: Jim Andrews announced that he has had meetings recently with Joe Pelle (det. & swat commander), Dave Hayes (asst. chief) and Sgt. Mike Root (patrol logistics). Boulder Police wants a copy of the existing MOU (memo of understanding). Jim K. gave Jim A. a copy. Jim A. will deliver it to the police this week. The existing MOU dates from 1992 and was an agreement between District 11 (BCARES) and BRCC, not Boulder Police. It was signed by the Boulder city manager, Boulder County commissioners, and BRCC director. Because the BRCC has been dissolved and replaced by two seperate 911 dispatch centers, the Boulder Police dept. wants a new MOU written. They also want to have representation on the District 11 (BCARES) board of directors. The would like to have their dispatch center director on our board. A motion was made and passed to add a rep. from the Boulder Police to the board. Asst. Chief Hayes also asked about financial support. He expressed a willingness to contribute city funds to District 11 (BCARES). The board felt that due to our low checking account balance, the best use would be to have undesignated funds that could be used for maintenance and repair of our equipment. We also should ask them for donations of old laptop computers (windows 95 or newer). Boulder Police are anticipating problems again on Uni-Hill the week-end of May 3-5. To be discussed later in new business.
There will be several events happening this spring that promise to keep District 11 (BCARES) busy.
April 9 (postponed to 16th) Longmont United Hospital communication test. Discussed previously, -- see above.
April 26 --- Boulder Police Dept is planning a training session for their new Incident Command Vehicle (ICV). The training is for both police dispatchers and District 11 (BCARES). Location is Boulder Police Dept. parking lot. Time: 1 to 4 pm. District 11 (BCARES) is encouraged to arrive early to start setting up video equipment. note: this is a Friday.
May 3 & 4 --- Boulder Police dept. is expecting a potential for rioting on Uni-Hill. This is the last weekend of the Univ. spring semester and also the Kinetics at the resevoir. They are planning on staging extra police near the hill and setting up a command post on the university. Jim A. reported that they definitely plan to call Sherif's SWAT and District 11 (BCARES) if problems broke out. They are also considering asking for us to be in the staging area ahead of time, but were concerned that this would conflict with our supporting Larry Stern's May 5th training exercise. The consensus of the board was that our number one priority should be to support the police for a real, potential public disturbance and make a training exercise as secondary. Jim A. was authorized to convey this message back to the police and offer our services to definitely provide TV crews on Friday evening, May 3ed. Also if by Fri eve. the police felt it necessary, we would supply TV crews again on Sat. May 4th. This will provide a stretch for Pete Goldman, eqpt. chair, to recycle the equipment, especially batteries, for Sunday, May 5th.
May 5 --- Jim K. announced that Larry Stern has asked that District 11 (BCARES) participate in a multi-agency, multi-county training exercise. It will be a simulated train wreck with weapons of mass destruction at the east entrance to Moffitt Tunnel, west of Rollinsville. Agencies from Boulder, Jefferson, Gilpin and Grand county will be participating. Larry requested we definitely provide TV coverage from the train wreck scene back to the command post. Larry also encouraged us to practice other communciation skills. (Larry said that the prioritized list was: 1) Voice 2) Data and 3) ATV - pl) Jim K. is coordinating this event. Jim K. said that he, Karen and Jim A. have already done a radio propagation survey from Moffitt tunnel. 2m and 70cm communications back to Boulder will need to be done on the Lee Hill CRA repeaters. The Colo Connection Mt. Thorodin repeater will also work, but should not be used except in an emergency due to its state wide coverage. Jim K. will contact CRA for permission to use their repeaters. Dist. 23 (JeffCo) will send hams to the site to do HF voice link back to Camp George West. Len K. will coordinate experiments on HF Pactor. Dist. 22 (Arapahoe) will participate in HF Pactor. We will also attempt to establish VHF packet links back to Boulder hospitals (priority 1. Avista, 2. Boulder Community & 3. Longmont United). Jim A. was asked to coordinate the video operations. If possible the board also wanted to try to relay TV pixs from the site not only to the local CP, but also to the Boulder 911 center. Jim A. cautioned that we would probabl y not have sufficient man-power to be able to also pull this off, especially if we end up sending TV teams to Uni-Hill on the previous two nites. This TV link will be the lowest priority item. It would involve 3 hops: Moffitt Tunnel to Wonder Vu (70cm ), Wonder Vu to Sugar Loaf mtn (23cm) and finally Sugar Loaf to Boulder (70cm). Topo map graphing of the Moffitt to Wonder Vu rf path show 3 major obstructions -- thus the probability of sucess is 50/50 at best. Jim K. will coordinate creating a list of volunteers and will organize a telephone tree call out later this month.
NEW EQPT: Pat Lambert proposed that we purchase a set of four new HF antennas for use at the May 5th SET. He said the cost would be about $120-150. Concern was expressed about our treasury. Larry Stern, treasurer was absent. A motion was made and passed to authorize the purchase of these antennas, only if we had more then $650 in the treasury. (note: 4/9, Pete Goldman contacted Larry Stern and reports that we only have $348 in our checking account. Thus we do not have enough funds at present to purchase these antennas.)
NEW MEMBERS: Pat Lambert, training chair, reports that he has been working with two new prospective members. Their names have been submitted to the Sheriff for background checks. Unfortunately, one applicant was found to have an unsatisfactory record. Pat moved and it was passed that we accept Dawn Wasner, K0DRW as a member of District 11 (BCARES). The other unnamed applicant will be notified by the chairman that his application has been rejected due to an unsatisfactory background check.
NEXT MEETING: Jim K. announced that he is scheduling the next two meetings to be in May and June. On May 14th we will discuss the events in April and May and the lessons learned. On June 10th, we will devote the entire meeting to revising the by-laws and MOUs. The meeting was adjourned at 21:15pm.
BCARESApril.doc (draft,jra) 4/17/2002 10:15 PM