MONTANA SECTION - AMERICAN CHEMICAL SOCIETY

April 13th, 2002 Executive Committee Minutes

Montana Tech, Butte, Montana

Andrea Stierle

As part of Spring Meeting in Miniature:

Board Members present:  Steve Holmgren-chair; Cyd McClure- past-chair; Donna Minton – chair-elect; Andrea Stierle-secretary and Events chair; Gary Freebury – high school outreach and safety chair.Doug Coe-Councilor;  Don Stierle-past chair and NORM program co-chair.

Steve Holmgren welcomed the Board and thanked Montana Tech and Events co-chairs Don and Andrea Stierle for organizing the event and Doug Coe for coordinating the abstracts.  He congratulated Donna Minton as our newly elected chair-elect.

Andrea gave the treasurer’s report for Doug Cameron and reported that, as usual, the section was doing very well. 

Councilor Doug Coe reported from the Orlando ACS meeting.  Several items are related to MACS members and Doug reported those items at our Board meeting. (For a more complete synopsis of the councilor’s report, please check the MACS website. Andrea)

The Council voted on the following actions:

• The Women's Chemist's Committee status was changed from an "Other" Committee of the Council to a Joint Board-Council Committee with direct access to the Board.   Your Councilor voted for this change.

• The Committee on Committees recommended the continuation of the Committee on Science and the Council and your Councilor voted in favor of this recommendation.

• Charles P. Casey and Alvin L. Kwiram were elected as candidates for 2003 President-Elect.  Your Councilor voted for Kwiram and William M. Jackson.

• A Petition to Increase the Size of Society Committees (the Budget and Finance Committee and the Education Committee) from 9-15 members to 12-20 members was postponed until the Boston meeting, where a Committee on Committee's review of all committees will be presented.  Your Councilor voted for this postponement.

• Applied the dues escalator:  (2002 dues of $112) (2001 CPI of 201.7 / 2000 CPI of 194.5) = $116.15 to increase the dues for 2003 to $116.  Your Councilor voted for this increase.

Two petitions were on the agenda for consideration at the Orlando meeting:

• A Petition for Approval for Non-U.S. Applicants as Society Affiliates.   This petition essentially changes references to National Affiliate to Society Affiliate in the by-laws.

• A Petition for Local Section and Division Support.  This petition fundamentally changes how the annual allotment for local sections and divisions is determined.  Currently all local sections receive a base allotment of $2,400 plus $3.00 per member for the first 2000 members and $2.00 per member thereafter.  These amounts were established in 1986.  From 1987 onward this allotment has been multiplied annually by the same ratio (usually a ratio of CPIs) used in calculating the dues escalator for each year.  This petition would replace this method of funding local sections with an annual allocation equal to 20% of the dues revenue generated by the number of members and National Affiliates of local sections.  The Committee on Local Section Activities would determine how this dues revenue would be distributed among local sections.  The distribution method must include a base allotment and an allotment tied to local section membership and may include other (unspecified) factors.  The method for funding divisions would be essentially the same.  This petition rather dramatically increases the allotment to divisions (from $377,843 to $1,163,327, using FY 2002 figures).  While the allotment for local sections also increases, the increase is considerably smaller (from $1,317605 to $1,434,450, again using FY 2002 figures).   Under the current system may divisions are experiencing financial difficulty, e.g., the Division of Colloids and Surfaces was reported to have a current deficit of $20,000.   It is not clear how individual local sections would fare under this petition.   The petition is likely to prove quite controversial.

• As a result of a tie for 2nd place in the balloting for the two candidates for District VI Director, three candidates will appear on the ballot, Howard M Peters, Stanley C. Pine, and Stephen A. Rodemeyer.

• After 25 consecutive years of positive bottom lines the ACS experienced a $1,800,000 deficit in 2001.  The loss is primarily due to investment losses, loss of advertising revenue (primarily in Chemical & Engineering News), and a Society initiative to make available via the internet all journal archives.  The budget plans calls for reducing this deficit to $1,000,000 by the end of next year and to erase the deficit by the end of the following year.

• The Committee on Publications will debut the ACS Journal Archive containing 11,000 journals, 500,000 articles, and 2,500,000 pages on May 15th.  The ACS Board is opposing DOE plans to publish peer reviewed papers on the internet at no cost to readers.

• The Membership Affairs Committee (of which your Councilor is a member) reported that by this time next year you should be able to review and renew your membership on-line, including subscriptions to Society journals and division memberships.

• The Committee on Professional Training's report on Libraries (available on the CPT web site) reveals that journal subscription costs are having a severe financial impact on bachelor's degree granting institutions.

• An  ACS approved chemistry minor is being developed for secondary education teachers.  Among the ~ 1050 chemistry baccalaureate degree granting institutions there are ~ 620 ACS certified programs.

• The Committee on Education has established a task force to examine the question "What would chemistry undergraduate and graduate education look like, if it were developed today from scratch?"  This Committee is also collaborating on new standards for high school teacher education.

• The Committee on Local Section Activities indicated that 87% of local sections filed on-line Annual Reports using SOLAR and 50% of these submissions used the EZ form.  

• The National Chemistry Week theme for 2002 will be Chemistry Keeps Us Clean and for 2003 it will be The Chemistry of the Atmosphere.

• The ACS has established a new national award for volunteerism to the Society.

Annual Report:  Cyd McClure commented that the Annual Report had not yet been filed.  She indicated that there was no penalty for this delayed submission, but that our money would be held up a little.

Chemical Safety Handbooks:   Steve and Gary suggested that the MACS send Chemical Safety Handbooks through OPI to all of the high schools in the state.  Doug Coe would obtain one copy first for our perusal at the Fall meeting.  If the Board approves, Andrea would coordinate the dissemination of these handbooks to all of the high schools and ACS would pay for the shipping.

Meeting- in-Miniature 2003:   Steve suggested that the next meeting in miniature be scheduled at Carroll College. (note from Sec. – Carroll College did not think they would be ready to host Spring 2003, but they would be open to hosting future Spring meetings.  The Spring 2003 meeting will be held at Montana Tech.)  The National Meeting is scheduled for March 23^rd  - 27^th, and with spring breaks, etc., next year’s MACS meeting will probably be held at approximately the same time.

NORM 2003:  Time to REALLY get moving on NORM.

·        Ed Rosenberg and Don Stierle have agreed to be program chairs.  Neither Don nor Ed could attend the NORM planning meeting.  Don actually made three attempts to get there, but a huge snow storm made air travel from Butte impossible.   The Board thought we should development a series of symposia for the NORM meeting.  Suggested topics included --- ACID MINE DRAINAGE; HIGH SCHOOL TEACHING STRATEGIES, NATURAL PRODUCTS, BIOINORGANIC CHEMISTRY, NANOTECHNOLOGY, UNDERGRADUATE SYMPOSIUM

·        Cyd McClure will ask John Nagy of Oligocide  to be the exhibit chair.  Cyd promised to obtain necessary budget information to help us with the planning. 

Chemistry Olympiad: Gary commented that most High School teachers do not apply to ACS.  We should give the ACS High School exam to all high school teachers for their use.

Winning Presenters for Spring ACS:  Eric Woller, MSU and Mike Vanatta, Carroll College.