Message from Graham Heenan Club President

Merry Christmas to staff and club members and families.

This time of year it seems very appropriate to thank those of you who make large contributions to our Club.

Firstly, thank you to our Club Manager David, who has overall management responsibility for our Club as well as having specific responsibility for HR (rostering ,etc) , systems, administration, finance and accounting, the bar operation and much more. All of these tasks are managed very professionally and efficiently.

Next, thank you Mike for the expert way that you run our golf operations, for our members and at our big tournaments.

David and Mike represent the face of the Club and are amazing hosts to us, our guests and green fee visitors to the Club.

It will be unanimous among members that Steve and Neil always present our course in outstanding condition. Thanks guys, you are stars and we are so lucky to have you.

To the Committee (including the Social Committee) I thank you all for your great ideas, your enthusiasm, and your practical lets get it done approach. Everyone chips in and it is a fun committee to be on.
Dads Army do a heap of good work around the course, to help Steve and Neil, and effectively they are a additional green keeper. They cut hedges, weed-whack long grass and weeds, tidy gardens and paths, chip wood, repair stuff, empty rubbish bins and do the weekly dump run, and more. Our thanks to you all.

There are many other helpers too - behind the bar, in the kitchen, selling raffles, starters at tournaments, the list could go on. Thank you for your help, we really appreciate it. As an example, I counted 18 members who helped in some way at the Pot Luck dinner on Christmas Hamper day. They all did so without even being asked. They just did what had to be done. This says everything about the excellent camaraderie of the Club.

So now on to a couple of major updates (with apologies to those who have already heard these on hamper day)
1 Irrigation water. Being a fairly impatient and optimistic person I naively hoped to have our future water supply sorted by Christmas! ... but maybe next Christmas?
We await ECAN's approval for us to draw water from the Hanmer Thermal Pools discharge bore before we spend money opening it up and testing flows.

Obviously that discharge bore was a one off and it had a specific consent. Our request to draw water off it is quite a different matter to dumping water into it - so ECAN's deliberations will inevitably take longer than normal. We still remain very hopeful that the consent will be granted and that we find all the irrigation water
that we need. ECAN advised us that we will need iwi approval of our proposal. This approval has been verbally given by representatives of Ngati Kuri (Ngai Tahu) with formal paperwork to follow. Again, our thanks go to Graeme Abbot, HSTP&S, and HDC for their generosity and help on this project. We will keep you posted on developments. Rest assured we still have access to our current
water source over this summer so the greens will be well looked after.

2 Financials - a half yearly report will be given to members in February. At this stage all of our main sources of revenue are ahead of last YTD (including green fees $26,000 up) and many of our costs are significantly below budget. So our finances are looking good. Last week the Committee agreed to pay off approximately half of the mortgage on the green keeper's house to save over $7000 in interest p.a. We fully understand that, at a worst case, some
of this loan may need to be re-drawn at a later date if the bore development is really expensive and if it cannot be substantially funded from grants.

Those of you who played in the Christmas hamper and attended the Pot Luck dinner and prize giving had a great time. Thank you to Carolyn and Nicky for organising the dinner.

Congratulations to all of you good golfers who won trophies. Be very proud of your win!

Great work Sandie and Greg on our Christmas parade float. It looked fantastic. Thank you for flying our flag in the community.

Finally, on behalf of the Committee I offer my best wishes to all of you for a wonderful Christmas and a fun holiday break.

We look forward to seeing a lot of out of town members on the course over the next few weeks - maybe your family members would like to take advantage of our holiday membership introduction to golf special as mentioned by David in last week's newsletter.

Kind regards
Graham

P.S. I promise that my message won't be as long as this one in future!!