Jim,
The budget is published every year in the magazine.
The PRA does own the airport. The PRA legal counsel advised a separate board should run the airport. The officers of the PRA are automatically the officers of the airport board.
I was elected vice president during the last PRA board meeting and so I got to sit in on my first airport board meeting just a few weeks ago.
The topics you are bringing up have been discussed many times over on this forum. You can find a great deal of posts on the topic with the forum search function.
Here is a short version.
No one in the PRA or the board cared about the details of the airport purchase for a long time after it was purchased.
When the PRA was flush with money, it paid for advertising for a small cable TV show on homebuilt rotorcraft. The ads cost far, far more then the few memberships the PRA was getting from the advertising.
When cash got short the PRA president at the time made a motion to stop buying the advertisement time on the TV show.
The producer of the TV show was a board member at the time. He took it personally, and with some of his friends started basically an underhanded smear, fear and doubt campaign against that president and the project he spearheaded, the Mentone airport. Thanks to some avid conspiracy theorists BS took on a life of it's own and still get passed around.
This was about the time I joined the PRA. To get to the bottom of the BS I got a commitment from 2 others to join me in hiring an independent auditor to advise us on how the airport was owned by the PRA. The auditor confirmed what the PRA board had been saying, that the PRA had followed sound advise and nothing was shady at all.
The 2 others that agreed to split the costs of the auditor backed out when they did not get the answer they wanted and stuck me with the bill. They were on a witch hunt and were upset when the offical answer came back that there was no witch.
It turns out that the purchase of the airport has been a god send.
It is a complete no-brain-er. For no more then rent on an office we got an airport. The airport will soon be a great source of revenue that will help fund many of the projects and member benefits that we have been wanting for years.
Even if we did not hold a convention at the airport it is still a fantastic asset and help to the PRA. It provides a stable, experimental rotorcraft friendly place for the office, a related museum and the convention.
Like Oshkosh, only a percentage of PRA members will ever fly into the airport but it is still a benefit to the organization and therefore to the membership as a whole.
With the help of the airport, the PRA will hopefully be able to now be in a position to sponsor/support events in other locations around the country. A number of board members are looking into how this might be done right now.
I have been contacted by several other clubs that want to mirror some of our flight briefing and safety operations used at the convention. What we have, was to a degree modeled off of the EAA/Oshkosh idea, and we improved upon it in our own way. Now it looks like we may be the model for others, who we in turn will learn from also.
Thank you for joining the PRA! I hope you will read some of the threads being posted on this forum about some of the great new projects underway and be a part of making the PRA even more of an asset to the experimental rotorcraft community.
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