ANST - Land funds...

[Timothy A. McDaniel]

I am rather leery of a Land Fund for a few reasons.

One, Donal mentioned already: it's N hours (for large N) from lots of
people.  The first land fund was in the West.  If you exclude the
island branches, Australia, and Alaska, the West is quite small
geographically but with a high population density.

Two, it's a *lot* of money to build a decent site.

2.1: It'd be used for only a small amount of the time.  (Rent it out
while we're not using it?  I think a tax lawyer would have to look at
that idea; I'm pretty sure there are limits on how a 501(c)3 org can
make money.)  If you want to cover rental costs, it may be more
cost-effective to establish a trust fund.

2.2: Perhaps that "lots of money" would be more useful in other ways.

Three, the SCA, Inc. corporate structure is one big block.  Branches
aren't independant groups in an alliance, they're branches.  If the
corporate level were to go down or get into a financial crunch, the
big expensive asset would be lost.  In fact, if they got into a
financial crunch, I'm fairly sure the directors would have a fiduciary
responsibility to the overall SCA to loot, er, use the assets of the
branches to keep the org going.  Sure, the Steppes has a big bank
account now, but it would only go so far.  (There is a proposal to
change this structure to some extent, but it's just a proposal now.)

Four, I've been in two groups that have had embezzlement on a major
scale.  I'm not happy with the idea of having large assets in the
control of what is evidently a good victim group.

Donal wrote:
> As soon as I win the lottery, I'm going to buy at least 500 acres,
> build a castle on it, and let the SCA use it for events. :)

OK, but I'm pretty sure the SCA insurance won't cover you if anything
bad happens.  I believe it covers only the Corp. itself, the
directors, and non-SCA property owners what rent stuff to the SCA.

-- 
Daniel de Lincoln
Tim McDaniel.   Reply to tmcd at crl.com
tmcd at tmcd.austin.tx.us is not a valid address.
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