Looking Forward to Our 60th Year

By Joelyn Carr-Fingerle, CPA

Yes, for 60 years the East Bay Chapter has been a gathering place for CPAs and their associates. What a glorious tradition! We plan to provide many more formal and informal opportunities for you—our members—to get together and share ideas, concerns, activities, opportunities—and often food and fun as well. We know that we can’t be serious all the time!

We will start the new year with our officers’ installation, which will be held Wednesday, May 27, at Tilden Park and offer an evening of food, fun and rock ’n’ roll dancing in a lovely setting. This will be the perfect time to bring a date, spouse or significant other so they can meet some of the people you work and associate with. It is not a dressy evening, but it should be relaxing and enjoyable. I hope to see many of you there. We will have time to say thanks to Michele and her team, and to welcome this year’s leadership team. Let’s give them all a rousing send-off!

The chapter’s technical committees, discussion groups and special interest groups are always looking for more members to attend their meetings, many of which offer CPE. Please take a moment to review the list and sign up for an interest group or two that captures your interest. Signing up will put you on the notice list for meetings and does not mean that you are on the planning/working committee—unless you want to be. I know this is a concern for many people, since we all have limited time (especially now as I write this at the end of March!).

One of our new committees this year is a Grassroots Legislative Team. A few issues face the profession in Sacramento this year, including mandatory peer review, licensing issues with the 150-hour pathway as the only pathway to licensure and California license reciprocity with other states.

We have visited all of our local legislative representatives, but we can always use more people to show up and demonstrate that we care. We also will need to visit each legislator more than once on each issue. Please let us know if you are interested in helping, since this affects all of us and our ability to practice as CPAs in public and private practice, industry and education. Often the timeframe for securing and holding a meeting with a local legislative office is short, which can make it tough for many people to attend. Therefore, having a pool of members to call upon is most helpful.

Our chapter will celebrate CalCPA’s centennial during our Past President’s Night July 21, at which time we also will celebrate our chapter’s 60th birthday. Please plan to join us! More information will be forthcoming.

I’m looking forward to this next year as your chapter president, and I’m honored that you voted to approve and elect our leadership team for next year. I hope to see you at the installation where we will have a chance to eat, drink, dance and be merry!  There will be plenty of opportunity to mix and mingle with our chapter officers, committee chairs and members, so please join us as we start our 60th year as a CalCPA chapter. We all want to serve all our members and would like to get to know you better. This should be a great way to start.

An easy way for you to plan to join us for all of our regular events is to purchase a Chapter Activity Passport (CAP) Card. It covers eight events, the seven dinner meetings in May, July, September, October, December, January and April, plus the chapter’s low-cost education event. The CAP Card costs $285, is fully transferable if you can’t attend and allows you the option to bring a guest to any of the above events for half the regular price. The card pays for itself quickly. For example, the low-cost education event includes eight hours of CPE, and the total cost of the card is less than the cost of any eight-hour Education Foundation class. It is a bargain even without the dinner meetings. If you attend everything, your cost is a little more than $35 for each event, and the regular price for any event isn’t less than that, so what a bargain! Once you sign up, you will just need to notify Soco to make your reservation for each event so she has the right count. But you’ll have no checks to write—it couldn’t be easier!

Hope to see you soon!
— Joelyn Carr-Fingerle, CPA

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 7:53 am and is filed under President's Message. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.