HTAG Guildford - HTAG Annual General Meeting 2004

Front Page >> Minutes >> HTAG Annual General Meeting 2004

HTAG Annual General Meeting 2004

HTAG AGM, Friday 17 September, 2004

Chairman's report

Ladies and Gentlemen:

In 2003/4 we have continued to follow the pattern set by Jean when she founded HTAG. Unlike many amenity groups in the area HTAG has again run a balanced programme of political - with a small p - and social events. Bob will be telling us a little later about the planning issues thrown up in the previous 12 months. Instead I will concentrate on 3 or 4 of this year's innovations.

Barbara Edwards introduced a scheme at the June Road Reps meeting for a kind of time bank. Briefly, you perform a service form someone and earn a "time dollar". This can later be exchanged for a service you need. It is similar to an exchange of baby sitting tokens but has a much wider scope. Barbara suggests it must be web based to avoid postage costs. The idea was not perhaps given the publicity it deserved at the time. Soon you will be able to read it on the web and judge for yourself what it might have to offer members of HTAG.

Between us Geoff Snelling and I have at long last set up what we hope will be an interesting and valuable project to establish an HTAG oral history library. We now have the equipment and the essential paper work to start recording the memories of experiences and events which will be of value to successive generations of Guildfordians. Its attraction for some of us, including your Chairman, is that the older we become the more valuable we shall be to the project. We hope to start with Jean so that we shall have preserved for ever an account in her own words of the history of HTAG. If you would like to take part please contact Geoff Snelling whose phone number is in the Newsletter.

Then at the beginning of September we had our first HTAG petanque tournament at the Manor House Hotel. It was an idea which Christopher de Chazal and I thought up as we were watching bowls in the Castle grounds. We had a good turnout and an entertaining game. We shall arrange another soon; if anyone knows of an 8mx4m patch of gravel closer to home that we could use please let us know.

More recently still the idea of a junk swap has been revived. On a prearranged day households will put out unwanted but still useful goods for anyone to collect. Guildford has some high class rubbish and it is surely better for it to be re-used than sent for land fill. I have no idea what legal difficulties there might be but we will see if we can make it work.

Lastly we raised the subs from an insignificant 1 a year to a barely noticeable 2. This has put our finances on a sounder footing and enabled us to refund all the expenses incurred by the Committee members.

My other job in this report is to thank very much indeed the Committee members and the Road Reps for all their hard work over the past year. I think we all recognise that Bob has the hardest job. His grip on the Guildford planning scene has become comprehensive. He is consulted, and consults, widely to ensure that your interests are effectively presented to the officers and Councillors involved in planning. If the Chairman fell under a bus no-one would notice; if Bob did we should be bereft.

Dotty is a most effective secretary who is able to put on paper the gist of discussions between 10 or 15 Road Reps and who prods the rest of us to do what we said we'd do. She also keeps all our records.

Jean and her social committee run a wide range of activities from rambles to garden open days which appeal to all age groups. As she saw clearly in 1971 to be a successful pressure group HTAG must first engender a sense of community and the social programme does just that. It also makes a little extra cash with which Jean funds senior outings.

The hard work running the web-site and editing the Newsletter is more or less continuous. It is only a year ago that Isabelle set up the web-site and it has grown to be an indispensable channel of communication for those members who have computers. For those who haven't the elegantly edited Newsletter provides a digest of new and forthcoming events.

Jennie not only liaises with other amenity groups in EGRA but has given Bob invaluable help with road surveys, SPGs and the like. It is an open secret that I find routine planning hard going and I am so grateful to Jennie and Bob for shouldering that burden.

When I saw Steve, our treasurer, on Wednesday he had that air of quiet satisfaction exuded by Chancellors in charge of a budget surplus. Under Steve's stewardship we now have spare cash in the bank and we thank him for looking after the books, paying the cheques and presenting the accounts each year.

The Pewley Down Volunteers, set up by Anne, very recently won a certificate of excellence for their work on our own stretch of chalk grassland. It is now a separate organisation but there is a large overlap between the membership of the two groups and until now Anne has been our environmental adviser. Her most recent effort on our behalf has been to complete a tree survey of the Ward.

Despite all the electronic communication we could not do without the Road Reps. They deliver the Newsletters, collect the subs, represent their members' views at Road Reps meetings and act as the decision making body of HTAG. v Outside the official organisation there are a number of people who help us. Our local Councillors are always there to give us advice; there is a group of very active members in Charlotteville like Tieleke and Gina who have made that into a really lively community; Sallie Thornberry helps with teas and giving people lifts; Angie Hargreaves organises the theatre outings. I expect I've missed several others - please forgive me.

Thank you very much, one and all, for the continuing success of HTAG.

One last point and I shall sit down. Everything HTAG does is useful and mostly fun and expands the opportunities open to our members. But activities take time and effort to organise and we all have other things we enjoy doing outside HTAG. We need more people to give up a little time to help keep the show on the road - perhaps by shadowing an existing committee member. What inhibits many people from volunteering is the strong suspicion that if he or she offers to help once a month he or she will end up running HTAG. I promise that won't happen unless he or she wants it to!

Stephen Wright Chairman

Menu

Front Page