Thank you, my points exactly.

During my one year on the board, Bill Goichberg and Bill Hall were
resistant to any serious efforts to cut costs. Now, it seems that they
want to sacrifice the entire magazine just to save the jobs of a few
of their non-productive employees.

Here are a few examples:

At the USCF board meeting in Monrovia, California on February 2-3,
2007, Bill Goichberg asked Bill Hall why the USCF had spent $37,000 to
sent a team to the World Youth Championships in Batumi, Republic of
Georgia, especially since that was not in the budget.

Bill Hall answered that he did not know but he would find out and get
back to us !!!

I did not say anything, but I felt that obviously he should be fired
if he did not know the answer to that question immediately.

Prior to the board USCF Board meeting in Stillwater, Oklahoma May
17-18, 2007, I sent Bill Hall an email with copies to the other board
members directing Bill Hall to bring to the meeting a list of all
employees of the USCF and a brief description of what each one of them
does.

The propose of my request was not to satisfy my idle curiosity. It was
because the USCF was suffering huge financial losses and there was an
obvious need to cut staff. Before cutting staff, we needed to know who
was on the staff and what jobs they were supposedly doing so that we
could decide what to cut.

When Bill Hall came to the meeting, not only did he not bring the list
I had demanded of him but he addressed my question in a very insulting
way. You can play the tapes and hear what he said. Any normal board
who heard such insulting and abusive language addressed to a member of
the board would have said in unison “You're fired”. Instead, the board
just went on to the next item in the agenda. The result was I never
found out and still do not know how many people are employed by the
USCF. Saying to read Chess Life misses the point. We need to know what
our costs are and Chess Life will just give us job titles as of a few
months ago, certainly not enough information upon which to make a
decision.

Even more importantly, during just one week before the May 17-18, 2007
meeting in Stillwater, there had been a week-long meeting of what I
called “Joel Channing and the nine wise men” in Crossville, Tennessee
during which they worked on the budget. Most of the nine wise men,
which included one woman, Donna Alarie, plus Chuck Unruh and several
other top financial guys, had taken time off from their jobs and
traveled at their own expenses to Crossville, Tennessee, to
participate in this meeting and discussion on USCF finances.

One result of this week-long meeting was the committee developed a
balanced budget to be presented to the board at its meeting the
following week.

However, when the board met one week later, the budget Bill Hall
presented to the board was not that budget but a different budget that
Bill Hall himself had written that called for a deficit of over
$100,000. When Bill Hall was asked what happened to the balanced
budget developed one week earlier, he replied that he had added in
some additional expenses after the meeting had concluded and the nine
wise men had gone home.

Included in these additional expenses that Bill Hall had just decided
to throw in was a 3.2% raise for every employee. When I objected,
Harry Payne, who was at the meeting, said that we just have to give
raises to the employees.

Actually, we do not have to give raises to the employees. One big
complaint against Bill Hall is that he hired these people at salaries
that were too high in the first place. The purpose of the move from
New Windsor to Crossville was to cut costs because employee salaries
were said to be lower in Crossville than in New Windsor.

However, at every position, the new hires in Crossville were being
paid more than their predecessors had been paid in New Windsor.

If we insist on giving all the employees raises, the result will be
that the USCF will go out of business and all of them will lose their
jobs. Is that what they want?

The result of Bill Hall just deciding to throw in some additional
expenditures that he wanted to make was that the work done by Joel
Channing and the Nine Wise Men during their one week in Crossville was
just thrown out. Their effort was completely wasted. Instead, during
the meeting May 17-18 in Stillwater, Bill Goichberg went through the
budget Bill Hall had handed to him and with a pencil crossed out
figures and wrote in new numbers, creating a balanced budget in that
way.

Here is where I was especially shocked that Joel Channing did not
insist that Bill Hall be fired. Imagine all the effort of nine highly
qualified people spending one week in Crossville and then having the
results of their efforts thrown in the trash. When Joel Channing just
yawned and moved on to the next item, I realized that he was not the
hard-headed businessman he claimed to be.

The current situation is that Bill Goichberg has presented a “New
Plan” that will make Chess Life optional and, he admits, will
eventually lead to a stop in the publication of Chess Life. In
addition, he also wants to change the dues structure again. Every year
that Bill Goichberg has been on the board he has changed the dues
structure, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes creating and then
abolishing new membership categories. He cannot seem to stop tinkering
with the dues.

He keeps claiming that it is the “Internet” that causes the USCF to
lose money. Here is a quote from Bill Goichberg's announcement of his
new plan:

“We need to recognize that we are in the Internet age and properly
adjust to new circumstances. It is the Internet that has been mainly
responsible for our membership decline, with online play hurting chess
clubs and hard copy Chess Life no longer being a valuable source of
current news.”

However, this is simply not true. It is not because of the Internet
that the USCF loses money every year. It is because of too much staff
and too little work for them to do. The Internet has resulted in
tremendous cost savings. Nowadays, most tournament and rating reports
are submitted online over the Internet. Previously, the USCF had to
employ clerk-typists to type in the results of every tournament game
so that it could be rated. Nowadays, most USCF members join and pay
their dues over the Internet. Previously, this was labor intensive
work that had to be done by hand by the office staff. In addition,
Chess Life production work now all takes place over the Internet. The
office in Crossville no longer has much involvement in that.

In spite of all of these tremendous savings, the office staff at
Crossville remains at about 23 employees, the same as it was back in
2003 before all of these improvements and also while the USCF was
still selling chess books and equipment.

This is why I keep wondering what the staff in Crossville has left to
do.

Now, instead of cutting the no longer necessary employees, Bill
Goichberg wants to cut out and stop the printing of Chess Life
magazine, which is the only membership benefit most members receive.
This is suicidal.

Sam Sloan