Chapter Board Adopts 2023 Budget
Your chapter's board of directors met on December 9 to consider and adopt a chapter budget for 2023. Overall, our finances are solid. The balance sheet stayed roughly steady during 2020 and 2021 and revenues outpaced expenditures in 2022.
The board focused on three major initiatives in this budget process:
- The scholarship committee and board have been exploring options for a sustainable future of the scholarship program, which this year provided $2,750 scholarships to a student in each of Washington's three accredited planning programs: Eastern Washington University, the University of Washington, and Western Washington University. The board made a significant investment in the scholarship program, and in the next generation of planners, through this year's budget process. We allocated $9,000 in chapter funds plus the revenue from this year's fantastic scholarship auction (nearly $7,000!) to scholarships in 2023, to be split evenly between the three universities. We also restored $50,000 to the scholarship fund, which had been moved into unrestricted fund balance at the beginning of the pandemic for chapter financial stability.
- The Youth in Planning committee and board have been working on making Washington, By and By more accessible to youth in the state. The board invested in this effort for 2023 including printing costs, translation to Spanish, and typesetting for the translated version. The board allocated about $13,000 to this effort, but actual expenditures will be lower if we're successful in securing a National APA grant or funds from the legislature (Representative Senn has expressed interest in state support for planning capacity, maybe even including funds for Washington, By and By).
- The last initiative is one we've been working on for a few years: right sizing the budget by zeroing out legacy expenditure lines that have not been used recently, and for which we didn't have a clear plan for 2023. Twelve individual expenditures were zeroed out this year, totaling $5,600.
Other budget items of note include a 4% increase in annual disbursements to sections, a standard increase for chapter office services, $5,000 for an outside audit of the chapter's finances, and $1,000 for processing this year's FAICP nominations.
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