Hello Club, hope everyone is enjoying the warm weather. We are up to 26 members and around $9000. That should cover the materials required to bring the field up to EPD requirements.
To proceed we first need enough consecutive days without rain for the ground to dry sufficiently for the work required. Then we need a weekend when Glen and Gene are available to run equipment and enough volunteers are available to lay out the fabric and work shovels. Doing the work ourselves is obviously the cheapest route, but it may take longer to complete due to the need to coordinate key peoples’ schedules and weather.
I asked Mark Pass to request quotes from local companies that could perform the work to evaluate whether this is a better alternative to doing the work ourselves. Several companies declined the work outright. Baldwin Paving gave us a quote of $20k and Lewis General Contractors quoted $16.5k. Joe McWaters (Glen’s dad), from McWaters and Sons Paving, quoted us $9600 with us providing the geo textile fabric ($3000).
These quotes are for a 1300’ x 12.5’ road and a 60’ x 80’ parking area, 4” thick (consisting of asphalt milling). The advantage of hiring a company to perform the work is that it would be completed when the weather permits which would get us operational quicker.
If the club decided to go this route, it would require additional funds. We have a few ideas to raise additional funds.
- A fund raising fun-fly. Roger Brown has offered his field for our use in Lineville, AL (approximately 90 minutes from Newnan). He’s hosted fun flies in the past and drawn 30-50 pilots from around the southeast. These are usually 2 or 3 day events with people camping on site. With volunteers from our club and donated food items, we could charge a landing fee, sell food, and raffle off items just like we do at our own events.
- Fund raising T-shirts. Adam’s wife Heidi has offered to design us a really cool Coweta Radio Control Club T-shirt. My wife has a local company that will screen print the shirts for us at a good price. There is also no minimum number, so we could do several runs if successful. We could sell these locally, at the fun-fly, and through online rc forums.
- The club could borrow money from a few members that have offered additional funding.
- GoFundMe. GoFundMe is a crowdfunding platform that allows people to raise money for various events and causes.
- No matter which course of action we take, this could help us with startup expenses including the installation of electricity, or could be used to pay back lenders.
I welcome other fund raising ideas, and feedback on the information I offered above. As a reminder, our operating costs were around $3000/year at our old location. Our costs will be minimal at the new location once the field meets the EPD requirements and is improved to the Club’s desired level.
Please share the GoFundMe link below to all your friends and family. Post on twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc… The more people that see the link the more likely we will get funding. I have also created as document you can print out and hang on bulletin boards.
https://www.gofundme.com/cowetaradiocontrol
Your VP