anyone at the ice o lated contest up for flying a couple of slug Perkys??
Hi Bob!!
If you get here and are just looking for a pilot for hire, I'm sure there will be some one to accommodate you. Perky and Fox.35 Speed are on the event list.
The club will be in for a challenge this year. We have been told by the St. Louis County Parks Department that they will be "changing their business model" this year and are taking over the issuance of permits to fly there and how the park is used. St. Louis County is 40 million dollars in the hole due to the maleficence of the irresponsible politicians in power, and they are looking at every little nook and cranny for revenue. So they are picking on the guys playing with model airplanes at Buder Park now. For over 60 years, there has been a group of local clubs called The Greater St. Louis Modeling Association Association ( or GSLMA for short) that has over seen operations at Buder since the property was donated to the County 60 some odd years ago and the modelers who use it have built most of what you see there. GSLMA issued the permits and collected the fees into a Field Fund. Basically all the Parks Depeartment has to do is cut the grass!!
But now, they have more or less deemed GSLMA as unnecessary and they have taken over collecting the fees and keeping the funds. Flying permits will go UP from the current $35 to $90. If a club wishes to have an event they have to rent the required field. If an R/C club wants the R/C site, it will be $300 PER DAY!! If the C/L club wants the C/L site, it is $100 PER DAY!! They want us to rent the facility that has largely been built and paid for BY THE MODELERS!!
The Parks Department doesn't have anything in place yet to facilitate all of this, so it will be business as usual at first and the Ice-O-Lated should go off as usual, but anything beyond that is still in question in my view. The Parks Department says they will have a web site operation by March or so to handle all of this. That remains to be seen. The governance of Buder Park and it's operations has been done by volunteers for 60 years with no problems and great success. But if things go through as they are planning they will have to add a paid staff to oversee it or just dump the responsibility on an already over worked and underpaid disgruntled employee. This all came down towards the end of this year and we still need to come up with a plan of action.
Some remaining questions are; 1) Is there a clause in the original deed of trust for Buder by the Buder family that guarantees modelers a place to fly? We have always heard about this, and some of the old timers that were there at that time, but who are gone now, told me that something like that is in place. If you ask people from the Parks department about it, they just immeadiatly deny it, but when pressed to see if they have ever even seen the document, the answer is no. 2) Buder Park is also used by many others including Baseball, softball, soccer and lacrosse teams. There is also a nice paved path around the perimeter of the park that is used by hundreds of people for walking, jogging and riding bicycles.. People fly kites, toss Frisbees, eat picnic lunches, there have been cross country track meets held there recently also. Are they going to have these people purchase permits to use the park!!??? When Buder Park floods and there is a huge mess left behind, will these people help clean up the mess?? In years past, it has been the modelers that have done the greater part of all work to clear debris and clean up the mess.
Stay tuned for further developments as we figure out our way through this. My first reaction is to just not comply. Don't buy permits, don't rent the facilities. Most clubs can not afford this anyway. Just let Buder sit dormant with making a few incursions in there to fun fly and such. The thought that the Department will just use it for other activities isn't too serious because they do not have the funds to change anything there. To rip out the C/L site would cost a LOT of money. The pavilion at the C/L site had a bunch of shingles ripped off by a storm a couple of years ago, and they keep telling us there are no funds to fix it but it's on the 5 year plan!! That is the kind of stupidity we are facing. I am a resident of St. louis County, and my real estate taxes and personal property taxes sure as hell have NOT gone down in my life time, and the County had doubled in size and probably tripled in population in the last 60 years, so what is the County Government doing with the money?? Time will tell
HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL !!
Type at you later,
Dan McEntee
Topic: ice-o-lated (Read 1402 times)
