Past Presidents Final Message

Home and Garden Show – as always a huge success and still our main fundraiser, this helps us keep our dues reasonable and gives us flexibility on our other fund raising endeavourers. This year we attained the largest profits ever.

2006 Spring Parade of Homes – great support and large amount of entries, several Built greens homes. All entries were again automatically included in our Building the Best Awards.

Golf Tournament – another great success after having to cancel the first date due to wet weather. Watering hole on number 06 was very well received. Must have had popular brands of beer - or something.

Once voice One Industry initiative – made us all aware of how big our industry is and what we should be able to accomplish with combined efforts to make our industry better. It was time for us to take ownership of our industry and decide on our own future. We helped lead the way with several of our builders and suppliers participating before the mandatory deadline. This initiative was unanimously accepted at the fall Alberta Convention.

Once Voice One industry continues on focusing on our main concerns of Labour Shortages, Safety, Government Relations and our Industry image.

Our association will be receiving up to 25 % back, which we can use for our local programs.

City Liaison – We’ve developed a good working relationship with the City of Lethbridge . Working with the city inspectors continues, they are actually listening and working with us on our concerns of permitting and inspections.

Building the Best Awards – Tremendous Success, awards banquet completely sold out. Great participation and support for what have become our largest event of the year. All of you that took the opportunity to dress back in time looked fantastic.

Christmas Party – well it was a little different, but also successful. Lots of participation, was amazing to see how competitive we are and what people will do for extra bonus points.

Scholarship Program – we have enhanced our commitment and made it possible for applicants to apply through out their apprenticeship. We’re working closely with the college to insure our funding will be used for industry related applicants and make each contribution large enough to be beneficial.

Safety – has always been on our agenda, we have set up courses for all members and made it easier for us to obtain our COR and SECOR. We still suggest all of you to take advantage of this program, Safety its here to stay.

Strategic Planning -We are in the process of organizing a Strategic Planning session in March and are prepared to move ahead with the new goals and objectives that will be set for our association. Again this will be in conjunction with the Alberta Region and One voice one industry.

Basically we have had a very busy year, all our functions were successful in both attendance and economically. This year we gave back to our members by absorbing increased membership fees, subsidizing the Lobster Night, the Christmas party and of course our annual Family Picnic. We even picked up the cost of the lunches at our Industry issues luncheon meetings.

We have managed to hold the prices on all our events even when our costs have increased. We have honored our commitment in giving back to our membership.

We have had great participation from you, our members, dinner meeting attendance is up, and all our functions have been very well attended. Heck we even had to have an election, cause we have more people wanting to get involved, this is fantastic.

Our successes have come from hard work and commitment. It’s from devoted volunteers, whom made up our extraordinary board of directors and exceptional committee members whom weren’t afraid to try new things, some worked, some didn’t no matter we were still successful and we had fun. The other component of our accomplishments came from our staff again their hard work and dedication was instrumental in our association achieving its goals.

It’s truly been a pleasure working with most of you and just plain interesting working with several of you. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to be your president. I have enjoyed it.

One of my favorite sayings is “don’t ask what your association is doing for you, ask what you can be doing for your association”, you have responded and shown you care and you what to be involved. Keep the momentum going and above all, have fun and be safe.