National Meeting Update

The Trout Unlimited National Meeting was held Sept 17-20 in Scranton, PA. Brett Lorenzen (state chair) and Ryan Maas (National Leadership Council Representative) made the trip for the Iowa delegation. The meeting featured the usual conservation tour and fishing trip in advance of the event. The Iowa delegation was not able to arrive until Thursday night, though, and missed the pre-event activities. The business end of the meeting featured two days of workgroups and panel discussions. Of most relevance to members from Iowa is the fact that the TUDARE project will be reorganized this year to be more of a stand-alone operation, as it has outgrown the NLC WG format. Brett Lorenzen will be leading that effort regionally. There are still no new staff pledged to, or likely to be assigned to, the TUDARE work . . . so we'll have to keep finding ways to fund and operate the effort on our own. The bulk of the other discussions this year seemed to center on paperwork. The annual CEI that is submitted by chapters to report activities is growing, and they intend to start requiring similar paperwork of state councils and Boards. We raised strong objections to that, as being a small council with only 3 chapters, paperwork is a huge headache for us--it's fine if the 20+-chapter councils need such a system, we just felt it wasn't very productive to impose it on us. The final status of the requirements is up in the air, and the Iowa delegation made it clear we wouldn't follow anything that wasn't required. Next year's meeting has been scheduled for Bozeman, MT in early October.