President

WISCONSIN

PRESIDENT’S COMMUNIQUE THANK YOU FOR VOLUNTEERING, ATTENDING AND READING

By: Dave Newman

their county when applying for project grants by April 15. Clubs should make sure the applications include the required cost estimates, photos and maps. Check out her power point to see the details of her presentation.

Well December is here and once again, somehow over the past couple of months thousands of miles of snowmobile trails have magically appeared across the state. If you were one of the club members who made that happen, thank you! It takes a lot of volunteers to do all the mowing, brushing, leveling plowed fields, putting up signs and of course contacting all of those landowners to make sure we have their permission for another year.

It was great to see everyone who attended the AWSC Fall Workshop. We had almost 600 attendees this year. I’m sure everyone had a great time, but hopefully you learned something too. If you did, please take that information back home and share it with your fellow club members.

I want to thank our speakers and workshop presenters for participating and inspiring us in some way. We have posted their power points on the home page of our website and they all contain some great information. Our speakers included Jillian Steffes, Snowmobile Grant Program Manager who provided us with information on how the program is doing and how clubs work with the program to receive their funding. She shared trail pass and registration numbers and showed us a breakdown of where the $10,137,434 in funding was spent this year. She also explained how clubs need to work with Another speaker, Drew Nusbaum, Regional Tourism Specialist with the Wisconsin Department of Tourism, talked about what snowmobiling does for Wisconsin tourism. He and Abby Hass, WI Governor’s Snowmobile Rec Council, Tourism Committee Chair presented a workshop, How to Promote Your Club. There they talked about how to use your local Destination Marketing Organization and your local elected officials to promote the impact your club makes on the local economy. They also talked about how to partner with local businesses in ways you can both benefit. Of course, Drew promoted the Snow Report that the Department of Tourism provides on their website to show trail conditions across the state. This is where you need to go for trail information. We also crowned a new Miss Snowflake, Rachyl Bursinski. Congratulations Rachyl and thank you to AJ Kreager for all she did to promote AWSC and our clubs last year.

If you are reading this, thank you. And please encourage other club members you know to read their WSN too. It is surprising how many club members and even club officers we talk to that don’t understand how AWSC operates or how the state snowmobile program works. One of my goals when I became president was to do a better job of educating our members through the magazine. We know everyone is not going to attend our conventions and workshops, but every member receives a magazine. But that can only work if everyone reads it. THINK SNOW!