The First General Business Meeting of the

Association of Coastal Engineers

Time and Date: 1:30 pm Sept 16, 2000
Location:             South Seas Resorts, Captiva Island, FL

President Fisher opened the meeting by noting that the meeting will be abbreviated due to the impending arrival of Tropical Storm (later to be Hurricane) Gordon.

He first thanked Orville Magoon of Guenoc Winery for hosting the reception the previous night. He also thanked Billy Edge, Karyn Erickson and Tony Dalrymple for organizing the day's technical program.

He then discussed a variety of points concerning the Association:

• The need to grow the organization through recruitment.
• Information about the organization will be provided through the web site (www.coastalengineers.org) and through email, as all but one member has an email address.
• The membership roll will be posted on the web by name and organization, but the email addresses will not be shown, due to possible concerns about spamming.
• The membership is invited to suggest to the governing board goals for the association, beyond those previously enumerated: providing continuing education, serving as a voice for the profession, and developing certification procedures.
• The present officers will be serving until the next annual meeting. By then a new slate of candidates for positions to be open due to expiring terms of office. (Board officers serve terms of three years. However, for this first year, a random drawing established the terms of office for the first board. The current board membership and the years remaining on their term of office are posted on the web site.

The meeting was then opened for general discussion.

Tony Dalrymple suggested that the topic of how the Association ought to respond to the Heinz Center Report Evaluation of Erosion Hazards (April 2000, ) be discussed. Robert Dean then discussed the fact that the report is harmful to the coastal engineering profession and deserves a response by our organization. A subcommittee will draft a document highlighting the shortcomings of the report and making recommendation that the National Research Council as an objective body be asked by FEMA to re-examine the issues that the Heinz Center was to address. There was no objection to this being an Association position.

(Secretary's Note: Although not discussed at the General Meeting, during the technical talks, a considerable discussion was engendered by a question about open source software versus closed source: should the Corps of Engineer's programs be open sourced, so that consultants and others could see what was in fact in these models. President Fisher will draft a letter to the Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory suggesting that this be done.)