By Greg Baker - June 2020
I would like to welcome LACA technologically to the 21st Century! While it has been over a year in the making and many, many hours of research, we are proud to announce your new LACA website. Your board has worked very diligently to bring interesting and useful content and it has been a labor of love. The LACA volunteer board and especially our program committee chairs have made meaningful contributions and I hope that you will find the new website a valuable resource. In addition to the new look and feel, we will be able to update it more frequently and easily with our water quality testing results, safety issues, updates on activities around the lake and updates on real estate developments. You will also be able to manage your membership, make changes if you get a new email address or move and need to change your mailing address. You will also be able to renew your membership and add a family member to your account. (Each LACA membership allows for two household members which will receive our monthly newsletter and timely E-Grams.) I would like to especially thank Irene Luck, our membership director for her efforts in bringing the website rollout to fruition.
This also is the inaugural electronic newsletter which we hope to publish monthly. Our traditional quarterly newsletter has served its purpose and I am a bit sad to see it go. However, it had flaws. By the time we gathered articles from our board, had our newsletter editor, J.D. Edwards lay it out, get the final draft to our printer and then out in the mail, weeks would pass. At times our articles would be dated by the time the newsletter arrived in the post. This electronic version will allow for J.D. to deliver to you more meaningful and timely content.
The paper newsletter also represented a significant cost to LACA. Close to 80% of our membership in our most recent survey said they would either prefer to have the newsletter electronically or had no preference. This mandate to move to electronic delivery, allows LACA to redirect these funds to our programs. If you are among the 20% that prefer the paper version of the newsletter, please give this format a chance, I think and hope it will grow on you.
I will shortly be sending out E-Grams about our upcoming election and annual meeting on July 25th at 9:00 AM at the North Anna Nuclear Visitor Center. We have Dr. David Schmale, Professor in the School of Plant and Environmental Sciences at Virginia Tech that has agreed to be our guest speaker and will address Harmful Algae Blooms. The meeting is open to our membership. We will communicate on both the new website and by E-Gram if we have to postpone due to the coronavirus.
