A Message from KTA's Executive Committee

November 20, 2013

We deeply appreciate the honor you have bestowed on us and the trust you have shown by electing us to leadership positions in KTA. We thought it would be a good idea to say a few things as we start our tenure.

First, we sincerely appreciate the legacy of our predecessors. In particular, we honor the wonderful leadership of Thyra Sperry over the past several years. Thyra and others have set the stage for what we hope to accomplish in the years to come. We also appreciate the excellent job that our staff of Curt and Shanna has done.

We have started our tenure by taking a hard look at KTA’s finances and financial reporting. We have decided to make a few changes. We think these are more changes in emphasis than fundamental changes.

We have noticed over the past few years that there have been a few “surprises” in our financial statements. We think these surprises have caused our membership to have less confidence in the credibility and transparency of our financial reporting. After checking into these matters, they seem to have been mostly caused by two factors:

• In some cases, KTA initially reported financial results that had to be revised after the auditors did their review and required some changes.

• Our fiscal year ends on September 30 of each year. In some cases, we received all of the revenues from a particular event (such as the Super Hike) in one fiscal year, but did not receive all of the bills for the event until the next fiscal year had begun. This artificially inflated our income for the earlier year, and reduced it for the next one. We are working closely with KTA staff, our accountant and our auditors on both of these issues. Our goal is to reduce these surprises to a minimum in the coming years.

It is important for us to emphasize that we have found absolutely NO evidence of improper activities by anyone, including past leadership of KTA, KTA staff or our accountant. We firmly believe that all of the previous “surprises” have been inadvertent.

KTA’s By-Laws (both the previous version and the ones the Council recently approved) provide for a Finance Committee to supervise KTA’s financial affairs. It appears to us that the Finance Committee has not been appointed for some time. That will change. We will establish a Finance Committee of the Board. The Finance Committee will assume an active role in supervising KTA’s finances.

We, the KTA Executive Committee, pledge to you, our most important constituents, that we will do our very best to keep KTA’s finances and financial reporting as credible and transparent as humanly possible. We call on you to hold us accountable to this pledge.

If you have ANY questions or concerns about KTA’s finances, we urge you to contact us and express them. We have provided our personal email addresses to make it easier for you to do so.

We believe KTA’s most significant challenge is to raise revenues to support our operations. After looking closely at KTA’s financials, we do not believe we have an expense problem. We believe the problem is revenue. This coming year will be a critical one for KTA. We must raise revenue, or we will have no choice but to make some very difficult choices about expenses.

In return for this, we have some requests for you. We have several ideas on ways to raise revenues. You will be hearing from us shortly on some of them. We ask you to do two things:

• Please support our plans to raise revenues in whatever way you can.

• Please give us your ideas to raise revenue. Again, we encourage you to email us personally.

KTA does have two excellent staff members. But, at its core, KTA is a volunteer organization. If we are going to put KTA on a firm financial footing, we, the volunteers of KTA, will have to do it. Please join us in this important work.

As always, THANK YOU for your continuing support.

Respectfully Yours,