Here’s to a Productive, Prosperous, and Green New Year!

As Chapter President this year, I look forward to contributing to our continuing growth in membership, our ever-improving programs and services, and the on-going health of this organization.

I’ll be talking a lot about sustainability this year - our board voted toward the end of last year to have sustainability be the unifying theme of everything we do over the next year, and into 2009. With a semantic twist, a major responsibility of our board is to “sustain” the chapter – and although this isn’t strictly the “environmental sustainability” we meant with our motion last year, it never-the-less is our duty as officers of the chapter to keep the organization healthy and viable for our succeeding officers and the membership as a whole.

At our first Executive Committee meeting of 2008, Jean Zagrodnik (President-elect), Bob Mellott (Secretary/Treasurer), Libby O’Malley (Executive Director) and I were going over the chapter’s financial history since the “turn of the century”, and what the chapter has been able to achieve in just this brief period of time is nothing short of amazing.

In the years preceding 2003, while not bankrupt or insolvent, the chapter was in a fairly precarious financial situation. With the 2003 convention came new life for the chapter, and through a string of strong leaders like Michael Johnson, Gordon Carrier, Jack Carpenter, Larry Hoeksema, Bob Noble, and Paul Schroeder, along with the incredibly capable guidance of our Executive Director Elizabeth O’Malley, the chapter has grown financially stronger by leaps and bounds every year since that time. I consider myself extremely fortunate to be taking the helm this year without having to be preoccupied by the financial issues that faced my predecessors, and instead being able to focus on enhancing the excellent services and programs we provide to our membership.

It is interesting to note that only a little more than ½ of our annual budget comes from your membership dues. And of your annual dues, only about $150.00 goes to our local chapter. So the remainder of our budget must be derived from many other sources such as sponsorship, document sales, job board income, attendance at our programs, etc. So it is through a lot of hard work on making improvements over the last few years in all of these areas that our chapter has become very financially sound.

So it is with the appreciation of the hard work of all our recent predecessors that I encourage you to get involved in the chapter this year – we can always use your help with our programs and committees – the more involvement we get from chapter members, the better we will be able to sustain the health of the organization!

-Kirk O'Brien, AIA
AIA San Diego Chapter President