Thirty-two members attended this week’s meeting. John Thomas brought a guest, David Shanahan, a long-time resident who may be interested in membership.
President Bob Baker opened the meeting. He was followed by Ned Meisner who gave the Thought for the Day, a homily from the Bahá’i book of readings. Baker then noted the WNRC Board has decided to shift the focus from polio to the community grant fund for meeting raffle collections.
He also called our attention to fliers on the tables for the Last Blast of Summer and noted volunteers will be need to serve beer on behalf of our club. Lastly he called our attention to a 5K race on August 16.
Rich Lallay told us of Operation Warm just having gone into partnership with UNICEF to provide 25,000 coats to needful people in Syria. Donations to support this should go to our WNRC Foundation.
David Birkenstein noted there will be a Membership Committee meeting at 11:00 AM July 31.
Several members had Happy Bucks moments. Both Tony Kambich and Heidi Sibert had comments. And Dr. John Ford was particularly pleased to tell us his twins graduated from NTHS, another off spring graduated from college and a fourth had graduated earlier this year from college.
The speaker for the meeting was Dr. Linda L. Yonke, the Superintendent of New Trier High School. She gave a very thorough Power Point presentation on the proposed New Trier Campus Facilities Project. This is a $100 Million capital building project with $11M coming from reserves and $89M subject to a November 2014 Township-wide referendum. Preliminary research by NTHS after many public meetings and information mailings suggests 65% of the residents favor the plan.
After explaining quite fully what they hope to do, Dr. Yonke engaged the audience in a Q&A. One question was what role NT West would play. She said they were comfortable with that facility and having the Freshman class there. No major expenditures are planned for NT West at this time. A question was asked about NTHS cash reserves and Dr. Yonke said their reserves after the $11M was spent would still be at 65% of their annual budget. This compares with 40-50% for the village and 25% for the Park District
After the meeting closed, Dr. Yonke graciously stayed on to answer a few more questions from members
