President’s Message
Scott Walstad - PBT President
I hope that 2012 has started well for everyone. As the calendar turned to 2012, PBT also turned to a new year with great anticipation. As many of you know I was elected President at our annual convention in October. I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself to the members who may not know me.
I have been a member of PBT for over 20 years. I served as Secretary for over 6 years under Presidents Ken Knowles and Marjorie Walstad. I was then elected Vice President and served in that position for the last 4 years. Not to make light of the Vice Presidents Office, I was asked by President John McCluskey to be the Legislative Committee Chairman. Over the past two Legislative sessions we have been able to defeat the percentage bail bill and pass other pieces of important legislation that positively affected the bail bond industry. My time spent over the past four years working with the legislative committee have been extremely educational, and I know will be beneficial in my current position as President.
Now that’s out of the way, lets move on to the future of PBT.
There are three main issues that I think of when I ponder the future of PBT.
Membership. We as an association can not do what we need to do without membership. This means we need your help. I have appointed Glenn Meeker as our Membership Committee Chairman. He has already begun to work on not only retention of current members, but also recruiting new members. I know all of you have been to one or more of our bail bond classes and have seen our membership team present, and the most frequently asked question is “What does PBT do for me?” Well, the short answer to that question is that PBT keeps all of us in business. I know that sounds easy, but it is true. We work very hard through our Legislative Committee to make sure that we are a viable part of the criminal justice system. Your participation in PBT makes that effort invaluable, by knowing the issues that each one of you face in your counties, and your contacts with State Legislative Members. That leads me to Issue Two.
Legislation: Our new Legislative Committee Chairman is Wynn “Doc” Dillard. Many of you know and love Doc. He was a member of the Legislative Committee for the last four years and part of the team that was in Austin on a weekly basis for the last two Legislative sessions. Doc’s ability to communicate with the Members is true plus for PBT. PBT had a successful 82nd Legislative session. We filed a total of nine bills, of which five bills were passed. Looking forward to the 83rd session in 2013, we have some unfinished business from the last session in addition to addressing other issues. As I said earlier, this is where your involvement in PBT is needed most. The Legislative process can be overwhelming, to say the least, and can be difficult to explain. Prior to our annual convention President John McCluskey and myself were asked to come toSan Antonio to explain this process. I think that our presentation was received well by those members in attendance. Because of this, I want to extend an invitation to anyone that would like for us to come to your county, to contact myself or Doc, and we will make every effort to come and discuss with you legislation and PBT. By going to you we want to explain what exactly PBT does for you, and why we need your participation. And now, my Third Issue.
Finances: Working with our Treasurer, Melinda Webb, we have re-categorized all of our accounts. This was done in an effort to have all of our finances more transparent for both the Board Members and the General Membership. The Finance Committee will be working on a budget that will be given to the Board at the next meeting in April. We have been working hard with our Executive Director to cut costs where we see that we can, without sacrificing services to the general membership. To that end we have finalized an agreement to move our annual convention to South Shore Harbour Resort outside ofHouston. Several of our members have taken a tour of the facility and came back with raving reviews. I hope all of you make plans to attend, this will be our last time to meet before the next legislative session starts so it will be important for you to attend if there are any items you need us to address legislative wise.
Lastly, I want all of you to feel free to contact myself or any member of the Board if there is anything you need help with. All contact information can be found on our website. I hope this finds all of you in good health.
I look forward to a successful year with PBT.
