I’m not talking down to anyone. I was stating facts to Mark about how the rose colored glasses through which he views his tenure in the woodshop, aren’t that rosy when we consider things like what it has cost the organization. There is not one other committee that has spent with such reckless abandon.
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And dare I say no other committee that needs to? I see problems listed almost daily - this broke, that broke, we’re out of sandpaper for this or that… these blades are damage and need replacing… someone gouged the surface on the multicam… OMG the dust collector gates aren’t open… OMG the Felder is full.
They have problems left and right that you don’t see from any other committee. They have more tools in use at any one given time than any other committee. Perhaps some compromise could be made around honorariums, training, ENFORCEMENT (don’t get me started on the # of threads where folks were crying about singling someone out for wrongdoing in there), and recognition for woodshop members rather than a constant freakin’ beatdown and not allowing them to handle things like they see fit as a committee. Let them call out users who break things. Start charging for negligent usage and breakage of blades and damage to gear. Start assessing people clean-up hours for screwing up machines and not using dust gates properly. There’s no shame in telling someone they need to put in 4 hours of cleaning over the next 30 days or they get the boot from woodshop, yet there are threads where people moan about singling people out.
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I like the cut of your jib, mister!
There are two different issues at work in your comment: the first one is can we do more to discourage breakage? And sure, I agree with you.
The second, though, is about the change in the amount of money spent in 2019 vs 2018 and why it’s so drastically higher. What Mark said was:
And I asked to know how he was measuring it. (He hasn’t answered) Because everything I see indicates that both injuries and breakage has increased, with the only real change to woodshop operations being a change in the training regimen.
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Which brings us back full circle to my first sentence above. 
You’ve written a few first sentences, so I’m not entirely sure what you mean, but when a member of committee leadership misrepresents his actions and the performance of the committee that resulted from them, it’s my job to look into that especially from a financial perspective.
Call it a “beatdown” if you want (Is that the sentence you meant?) but lies should be beaten down; especially when they are meant to cover up thousands and tens of thousands in misspent funds.
I think your statement needs clarification. My interpretation is you are claiming fraudulent, misappropriation of funds used to benefit an individual. You can make the assertion that things were purchased that you do not believe should have [people are allowed differing opinions], but to imply that things were not purchased in good faith for the benefit of DMS is a distortion of the facts as I know them [and I do not believe anyone has made that claim].
I believe the feud has gone on long enough in this thread and should be closed. We have stopped listening and started sharpening pitchforks on both sides. Our Excellence has been thrown out the window and we are slinging more mud back and forth without regard of the consequences or truths.
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No, I’m not claiming fraud, if I was, I’d have said that. Although I do question some of the lumber purchasing which appears to have gone towards Mark’s for-profit classes without DMS reimbursement, that’s a different issue. This whole issue began as an affirmative statement from Mark regarding the performance of the shop under his tenure. I believed then, and believe now, that this was a false statement. I have asked him to back it up and thus far he has declined my invitation.
Raymond decided to question the veracity of the numbers I quoted after Mark made an additional false statement about the items included in them. I’ve attempted to address Raymond’s concerns.
That is what I figured you meant to imply. But spending money on repairs and maintenance [not getting into the performance or other argument] is not “covering up thousands and tens of thousands in misspent funds”. To me that is claiming fraud.
I do not have the metrics before or after; my time at the Space has always been minimal. I will say that Mark has always worked hard for DMS as well as the Woodshop. That the effort and time he has [and continues to] put in is more than offering classes, and he does not get paid for that time. I will also say that I have taken the last three iterations of the Woodshop classes, and they have gotten better every time. Those are facts [granted from my point of view].
We can disagree on how classes are offered, their value, and if teachers should benefit financially [and how]. Manipulating statements, putting forth a straw man, and personal attacks shuts everything down. This thread [and a few others] are full of them - and no one is benefiting, it is only feeding the fire. My comments are not directed only at you…
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The answer was in the original statement Brad. I based my metric on the percentage of new members using the woodshop and my first hand experience of being one of the people who usually fixes the stuff that breaks.
Simply put, if we have 10 new members using the woodshop and 100 veterans, and the new member tool breakage rate is 20%, and the veteran tool breakage rate is 1%, there are 2 new members breaking things for every single veteran member mishap. If we have 100 new members and only 10 veterans remaining, there are 200 new member mistakes for every veteran member mishap.
While neither of these scenarios contain actual percentages, they do clearly illustrate why and how we would see an increase in instances of tool breakage without seeing an increase in the percentages by user type, which is what I said in the first place.
I have also not personally noticed an increase in the occurrences of tools breaking, but I have noticed a severe increase in the average down time due to delays in the procurement process.
So it’s purely opinion. You could have just said that. The numbers would still disagree, but at least it’d be honest.
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I really hate to jump in the middle of this, but here goes:
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Do we have a breakdown of the $39K the Woodshop spent? What’s in that number? What is skewed higher than the year before? Is is honarariums, or wood, consumables (sandpaper, bits, blades?), maintenance? It would be most helpful in these discussions to have some more detail. Just saying the Woodshop spent more than it should last year isn’t very illuminating or helpful. (And full disclosure, I was a CPA in a previous life and may have a higher than typical interest in the financial details.)
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Do we maintain maintenance logs for each of the big, expensive power tools? (Table saws, planer, jointer, etc) If not, it might be a very helpful thing to have in these rambling discussions. Knowing how much up/down time we have with a tool, how it was broken, by whom, doing what, how much it cost to repair, and how long it was down all might be useful metrics to track.
Without specifics, these conversations on Talk don’t really go anywhere and seem to degenerate rather quickly.
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I’m not in a position to break it out myself compared to someone with better finance insight, but per @brsims post higher up that number is entirely consumables (which in our finance classification includes repairs)
I would love to see such logs being kept for all machinery.
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Everything I’ve spoken about in this thread is the category of consumable tooling. It does not include honorariums, Large tool expenses, or major repairs (like multicam). Most of it is things like saw blades, replacement parts, (bizarrely) it’s where they coded a significant amount of lumber, things like that.
No, not to my knowledge.
Again, I brought it up in response to what Mark said about his stellar record of Stewardship. The refrain for some time now is that he has made it safer while reducing maintenance issues, and I do not believe that to be supported by any evidence I’ve seen. I did not come to this thread to analyze the root cause of woodshop’s spending problems, which I acknowledge is a complex issue.
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But @brsims, lacking anything more specific financially with regards to consumables, aren’t both you and Mark arguing anecdotally?
If you are looking for volunteers to dig into the “consumables” detail, I would happily volunteer my services. I will be talking to the new Woodshop chair about creating and maintaining maintenance logs at the next Woodshop meeting on March 7.
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I’m working directly from data recorded in Quickbooks, so no, there’s nothing anecdotal about it.
I’m not, but thanks for the offer. As I say almost every time this stuff comes up, you and every other DMS member are free to access the space’s quickbooks online account.
I’m sure the recorded numbers are accurate, but is it possible that any of the charges could either have been assigned to an incorrect account, or consolidated to the point where the data don’t tell us anything?
When expenses are recorded:
- Is the “chart of accounts” extensive and detailed enough that we have precise and unambiguous account selection, without multiple type of expenses being lumped together?
- Are there any occasions when an expense could possibly go into more than one account and someone had to select an account?
What documentation do we have to:
- define the accounts?
- train the affected people to choose the correct account?
My advice is to take a look. Yes, occasionally charges do get assigned to incorrect accounts but not to the extent that explain these gigantic increases. No, they are not consolidated beyond usefulness. Yes, the chart of accounts is detailed enough. Yes, there are instances when a charge could be classified more than one way, but again, not often enough to explain $22,000 in increased consumable spending in a single year. To define the accounts, we have the name of the account and oversight by the treasurer and bookkeeper. That I know of there is not any training documentation, but Kathy and I address problems as we find them. Again, this is not an issue of misclassed expenses, but feel free to take a look.
Thank you. I wasn’t claiming things are misclass’d. Having never looked at the accounts (despite your invitations to do so), I guess I just wondered if the accounts had a suitable level of granularity if committees wanted to do detailed forensics on their own spending.
It’s not uncommon for charts of accounts to have some ambiguity (or consolidation) and then when people try to understand the details of their spending they find the data lacking.
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I find them to be sufficient. I acknowledge that it’s an area upon which reasonable people could disagree, but I find that granularity in the chart of accounts cuts both ways.