ASSOCIATION  MESSAGE FROM THE OABA CHAIR


This Is All About You Larry Yaffe, OABA Chair 2019


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have just returned from our an- nual Spring Board Meeting. This meeting is where our organization sets our annual strategic plan, and our committees set their action plans for the year. Our Board members use their own money to fly in from all over the country, as they do for any OABA Board meeting or event. For the second year in a row, we chose to hold this meeting in Washington, DC, so that we could spend a day lobbying on Capitol Hill for issues on behalf of all OABA members. As I write this, we are still waiting to hear about the status of the H2B work- ers and the cap. The Board is moving forward in attempting to find a legislative permanent solution to this issue. Michael Wood has already been to Washington, DC, 5 times in 2019 in order to at- tempt to gain support for this, but we know that this will take time, and more money. Yesterday, our Board members had 20 meetings with US Senators & Representatives and their staffers. In addition to communicating with them about the H2B issue, we also spent time trying to win their support on the Mobile Workforce State Income Tax Simplification Act of 2019, and educate them on mobile housing issues that are faced by many.


The main focus of the discus- sion of our Board meeting over the two days prior to heading to the Hill, was discussing the ur- gency with which we need to raise funds to cover the efforts of the OABA. For the past several years, we have spent a lot of money out of the OABA’s savings to cover our Board’s efforts on the above and other issues. Already this year, we have spent time and money on non- H2B issues in Florida, Texas, and California. We also spent consid- erable time and money trying to combat AT&T’s insulting advertis- ing campaign. Our Board voted in November that we can no longer af- ford to spend our savings to subsi- dize these issues, as we don’t have much of it left in our bank account. Our committees met with renewed urgency and purpose to make plans on how we are going to financially support the H2B effort and others. Our Fundraising Committee started making plans for our annual Top Golf event in 2020 on how to make it bigger and better, and discussed possibly creating another fun event at a different time of the year that could benefit our indus- try. Our Membership Committee


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$285,000


$250K $285K


$200K $100K $50K $25K $10K


$6,165


4  OABA ShowTime Magazine | JUNE 2019


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