Bishop (Name),
Thank you again for the notes on the Bishop’s Welfare Council meeting on Tuesday night.
SCOUTING
We’re asking wards to recharter ALL boys 12 - 18 years of age. It won’t affect anything, but the Church has asked us to do it as a gesture of goodwill inasmuch as the Church plans to pay for all YM in the Church to be registered in 2018, even though there will be no Scouting program for 14-18 year olds this coming year. We won’t get after anyone if they choose not to register all boys, It’s just a favor asked of us at Philmont from the General YM Presidency, that I recall.
I’ll copy this to President Christiansen so he can clarify or correct anything I say here.
FINANCES
As for the budget, from the beginning, when we announced wards could roll-over surplus funds and immediately saw wards rolling over significant surpluses the first year and each subsequent year, we announced that we would allow wards to only roll over a surplus of 50% of their annual allocation. For instance, if a ward is earmarked to receive $5,000 for their annual allocation based on sacrament meeting attendance, then we would only allow them to roll over a surplus of up to $2,500 going into the next year.
We are not trying to punish any unit with this policy, but only help encourage them to find ways to spend their funds. The Church wants us to spend these budget allocations to bless each unit’s members. That’s why we created the attached document a couple of years ago (updated in May of this year) in hopes of helping bishops find ways to spend their surplus funds wisely and not frivolously with an end-of-year, use-it-or-lose-it attitude—but spend the funds!
We didn’t want the 50% roll-over cap to create that use-it-or-lose-it attitude, so we waived it last year. Every unit got to roll over 100% of their surplus. But that just compounded the problem for some wards, as you can see below, which now have HUGE surpluses that they continue to roll over year after year.
The last report I got from Brother Lowder through October 2017, with 2 months remaining, here’s how the financials looks for each ward:
Ward / Est. Annual Allocation / Current Available Funds
D / $3,800 / $5,263 (based on this, 50% of the annual allocation $3,800 would be $1,900; they need to spend $3,363 ($5,263 minus $1,900) before year end to get within the 50% roll-over cap)
E / $4,400 / $3,219 (50% of $4,400 would be $2,200)
Pio / $2,400 / $1,242 (50% of $2,400 would be $1,200)
PV / $5,300 / $3,606 (50% of $5,300 would be $2,650)
SR / $5,600 / $2,514 (50% of $5,600 would be $2,800)
TC / $4,500 / $4,242 (50% of $4,500 would $2,250; they need to spend $1,992 ($4,242 minus $2,250) before year end to get within the 50% roll-over cap)
WH / $5,400 / $6,065 (50% of $5,400 would be $2,700; they need to spend $3,365 ($6,065 minus $2,700) before year end to get within the 50% roll-over cap)
YSA / $1,200 / $525 (50% of $1,200 would be $600)
As you can see most wards are right on target. But a few like Damascus, Tickle Creek and Walters Hill have continued to build up sizable surpluses. We want everyone to spend their funds wisely, but we also want them to know that if they don’t spend all of their surplus we hope to use those funds to continue to drive down the cost of summer camps and thus reduce the burden on families. So it will benefit them.
Because of the positive impact youth summer camps can have on the lives of the youth in our stake, we feel the summer camp subsidy is one of the best uses of budget funds we have and want to continue to apply surpluses in that direction…and not spend those funds frivolously. So we hope wards with large (over 50%) surpluses will spend wisely before the end of the year and gladly roll over their extra-surplus to the stake for summer camp subsidies and so there is NO cost to families for the trek in 2019.
Finally, in response to your comment about an expectation, we really want to give every ward total latitude in spending thru the rest of the year and then rolling over whatever budget surplus they want to roll over, up to 50% of their annual allocation. I believe the estimated annual allocations above are what Bro Lowder is projecting for 2018. Bishops can send him an email and he can give them the precise allocation that they received in 2017, on which the 50% roll-over cap will actually be based.
I’ll let you use your discretion as to whether you want to forward this email to the bishops. We’ve been reluctant to send out such a report to all units so we didn’t create any hard feelings that one ward has more $$ than another. But, as before, every unit appears to be headed for a year-end surplus.
Or, if it’s just too complicated, we could have a conference call, if that would help.
Sorry for any confusion this has created. I assume the topic came up because we waived the 50% roll-over cap last year, but announced that we would not waive it at the end of 2017. That is still our plan.
Hope this helps,
President Lewis
No comments:
Post a Comment