Common House minutes: 2017-01-26

Minutes:

The Common House Committee met at 10 a.m., Saturday, Jan. 28, 2017, in the
Sitting Room. *Present: *Nancy Harter, Katie Wimsatt, and Jim Graham.

AGENDA: We took up just 1 item of business, the use of the west end office
in the Common House.

DECISION: This office will be designated for use as the *Great Oak
Community Office.*

The principal use to which this office will be put is for the storage, in
one locked room, of community documents. These are now scattered in a
variety of locations: F&L documents in a locked file cabinet in the
entrance area; Meals billing files, and some archives, in the sitting room;
site plans and oversize archival files in the basement at #34; committee
files, either in members' homes, or in some cases probably lost.

The office also can be used as an additional small meeting space for
committees. And the tech closet can be available and protected.

This office at present is vacant. No one from Great Oak has asked to rent
it, although there have been 3 bids from Touchstone residents.

When Elph ran a survey laying out this proposal, and listing its pros and
cons, there are 28 responses: 24 of them "Yes," and 4, "No."
The comments listed a number of cautions that need to be dealt with.

The community budget for this year does not anticipate any rent from 1
office - as has been our practice every year. So it will not affect
members' dues immediately; but of course we will not be accumulating a
surplus to be used in the coming year. This will be reviewed in budget
meetings this autumn.

Before this can be used as a community office, we need to fix a combination
lock on the door, and give the carpet a thorough cleaning. Nancy will ask
the Work Skills crew to try to attend to the cleaning. We will get a small
table, and additional file cabinets. Then we can ask for a crew of
volunteers to get the room ready, and the files moved.

We expect to add a work position for office manager. Committees will need
to manage their own files, and everyone must be warned not to simply dump
things there.
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