[NCUC-EC] Travel Expenditures

[Milton L Mueller]

> -----Original Message-----
> 
> Someday we should circle back to the question of whether we shouldn't
> have a flexible but still enunciated policy on travel expenditures,
> prior conversations have gone both ways a bit.  In addition to the
> criteria suggested prior we might want to simply state answers to sort
> of questions below for future reference.  I also would like to be able
> to make it known on the members list that if one gets engaged and
> contributes and needs to be there there's some x amount, maybe $1k, that
> could be available for one person per meeting.
> 
> In the meanwhile, Milton it'd be helpful to hear from you what the
> practices were on previous ECs and whether anything was ever written
> down for reference.  You've got the check book and the institutional
> memory, so hearing how it's been done would be great, including the
> handling of payments logistics, e.g. does Wilson need to pay out of
> pocket and then send you a receipt for reimbursement or can we allocate
> up front, do you do it by wire transfers, etc.

[Milton L Mueller] Whatever was written would just be on the mail list discussions we had. There was a pretty firm policy however, and it was this: set a FIXED budgetary amount for travel per meeting that would ensure that over the course of the year we could send 2, sometimes 3 people. We could always nibble around the edges of that budgeted amount, when travel to certain locations was lots more expensive, but we tried to stick to it. Future policy could fiddle with the number of people or the per person budgeted amount as our resources expand. 

The virtue of such an approach is that it made planning easier and imposed a slightly longer term perspective on the group as a whole in making its decisions. Allocate within the budget constraint. If you think about travel budgeting as something you do a month or two before a meeting, rather than as a budget item for the entire year (or even a 2 year cycle) then you are guaranteed to have a rush of demands for travel support at the last minute as excitement about the meeting grows. Decisions will tend to be made without reference to the long-term sustainability of the level of support.