Some time ago, I promised to give you all an update on all the Club projects being considered by your Committee of Management. The only one that hasn’t been in this column is the installation of solar panels onto the roof of the Clubhouse. With the approval of the Finance Committee, the CoM decided to go ahead with this as it made sense on a number of levels, both in terms of a permanent and significant reduction in our BELCO bills as well as reinforcing our green credentials. The current status is that our application to install the photovoltaic panels on the roof is in planning (but since the RG is no longer the “Official Gazette”, unless you know where to look, the planning applications remain well hidden somewhere). We are informed that approval will take anywhere from 3 weeks to 3 months. The pay-back on the capital expense is just under 7 years. We owe our thanks to Matt Thompson who greatly assisted with an engineering assessment of the various proposals that were studied by the CoM and also to the CoM members who gave up a long Saturday to sit through all the presentations.
Alternative Energy Systems were selected as the provider and so hopefully in the not too distant future, you will see an AES sign up somewhere on the property and their trucks in the car park. An added bonus is that the owner of AES, Tim Madeiros and his wife, Tonya, elected to join RHADC and it was a delight to see them dining on the patio last Saturday evening. Tim & Tonya are profiled in the new members section of the newsletter this week. Their experience at the Club was so good that they sent in this email which we were delighted to share with Cassius and the staff: “Tonya had her staff summer party cruise catered by the RHADC today. The food was amazing. Our dinner last weekend was awesome as well; we ended up calling her parents to join us. Kudos to the kitchen. Really enjoying our membership.” We hope this is only the first of many happy membership experiences for the Madeiros family and our other new members.
On the subject of member experiences, we are currently planning the Club’s Christmas offerings (the good thing about Christmas being just around the corner is that this annus horribilis is nearly over) and whilst we all want to celebrate the end of 2020 our experience with New Year’s Eve is not stellar. The average number of members who elected to spend NYE at the Club for the past 3 years is < 20. To do a dinner for 20 people is definitely not cost effective and requires having nearly half that number of staff on duty. So, please, you tell us what you would like to do on NYE and we will respond accordingly. Thank you
Elspeth Weisberg
Commodore
21 October 2020