Preach! I am tired of Lodges playing Investment Firm. It's disgraceful to accumulate rather than use resources.
A note though, as I understand it, in New York it is unconstitutional (and possibly illegal) for Trustees to have a separate account they can access at will. In an emergency it would be more a matter of forgiveness than permission.
Oringinal story did not reflect the bulk of the 'treasury' of this lodge is from the sale of a lodge building years ago, and is not available for general funds without conversion and taxes.
I get that, but it's still the Brothers' money to be USED, not banked ad infinitum.
I've seen Old Timers waiting for that perfect property to magically appear and be bought someday, always thinking to the past instead of a real future. In another Lodge I've seen a building go to $h!t while sitting on half a million dollars, solving every problem with duct tape and scratch-and-dent mechanicals for generations.
Even if most of the Lodge's funds are in investments, I would say it's best to regularly run a deficit budget to absorb and use most of the returns from such investments. And if the amount is really significant, LIQUIDATE IT with meaningful projects and upgrades.
Or we can just keep playing Banker for that raining day while we're already treading water.
Lodges in this Jurisdiction do sell their buildings from time to time, and then go on to use those moneys as desired including as general funds. There are no particular regulatory or tax issues that would prevent a Lodge from doing so.
If the Lodge's proceeds from the sale are somehow restricted, that restriction must have been put into place by the Lodge.
Granting that the Lodge may have done something like that though, it does beg the question, if the Lodge can't use the funds to improve its current building, and can't use the funds to improve the experience of its Masons, and can't use the funds to provide financial relief to the children of Masons, then why would it need the funds at all? What would be the point of holding them?
That is interesting. Here, while the Grand Lodge does not really regulate Temple Boards, there are some guidelines or best practices. Generally it is thought proper that a Temple Board hold enough financial resources to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of with the building over the course of a year. It holds those funds in its own name, and spends them on its own authority.
In practice, how it works at my Lodge (I've been on the Temple Board for a great many years now) is we have large commercial tenants (a law firm and an accounting firm) so the building has to be functional at all times. The Lodge ensures that the Temple Board always has enough money to handle whatever emergency might arise with the building, so that the Board can move very quickly. When there is a profit derived from the building (not often as the commercial tenants subsidize the Masonic tenants) that profit is remitted to the Lodge on a yearly basis.
But the Temple Board never has to seek permission from the Lodge to manage the building or take care of problems with it.
Other Temple Boards, in buildings without commercial tenants might well have less funds on hand to handle emergencies, because without those tenants time is not nearly as sensitive.
We don't have Temple Boards in the same sense here. Either the Lodge owns it or it's owned by a completely separate legal entity that has a board made up of representatives one or more Lodges.
In New York State, all this sis subject to the Benevolent Laws. The Constitutions defer to it and so we don't have specific Masonic laws regarding temple ownership outside the Lodge being the direct owner of the real estate.
We are a bit different, probably due to differences in State Law.
Our Temple Boards are separate corporations from our Lodges, and those Boards own the Real Estate. The Lodge in turn owns the Temple Corporation. Essentially they are Real Estate Holding Corps.
I was a member at that meeting, which ran long for the amount of items covered. So when I stood to make a proposal, I was tired, and anxious to get home. And I had a vision in mind that would take more time to explain than politeness would allow.
I mentioned that Washington natives tested in the top 1/3 of the country for IQ. Yeah, hard to believe.
We are also in the situation we found ourselves after WW II - schools were decimated of teachers who went to war, and we lost reading skills for 3 years. Today we have shot ourselves in our feet with 'woke' education and CoVID practices that have damaged our kids as much as WW II.
And guess what this lodge has - a Bikes for Books program for the local schools. So the schools already know us. (neighbor across the street is riding one of our Bikes4Books as I write this). In fact, Bikes for Books can be found across the entire state in our lodges. So clearly the public can see how much we value education for our kids. So it would be a natural extension of our existing relationship with public schools to expand the program to allow access to additional reading material. It has a name. The SRA Reading Laboratory. Assembled decades ago, so it's free from 'woke'. But it uses the rainbow of colors to hide reading level, and tests are pass / fail-retest.
"The premise? This giant box of gloriousness was full of stories, each one assigned a particular color based on developmental milestones. Students initially took a brief test to determine what color (reading) level they should start at and then were given a story on card stock labeled with that color. After reading the story, you answered a series of reading comprehension questions related to what you just read. Successfully make your way through enough of these stories and you got to move on to the next color in the box. Educators used this as a way to both teach reading comprehension and to get a better understanding of the reading levels of their students. And let’s be honest, the air of competition helped some of us lazier students.
The SRA Reading Laboratory was designed in 1950 in rural Florida by Dr. Don H. Parker. A thirty-two children schoolhouse was the origin of an educational tool that would last for over 50 years. His previous experience in the psychological field would give him insight that made teaching all children from the same material seem antithetical to his knowledge of the developing minds of students. Driving through the countryside with an overloaded car, Parker visited K-12 students throughout rural Florida to administer reading tests. Faced with the daunting task of having to hand-grade 3,000 tests, Parker enlisted some of his school’s most intelligent seniors and they began to score the tests. In plotting the scores, the traditional bell curve began to materialize, giving his theory about the role psychology plays in education merit. Individual differences in learning capacity and speed had to be taken into account if educators were going to successfully raise a generation of readers. Dr. Parker’s school did not have the budget necessary to purchase entirely new and separate workbooks for each of the students based on their individual developmental levels. However, there was a series of workbooks containing 40 lessons each that could be purchased for a dollar. Parker proceeded to divide each of the lessons up into folders to be completed and then passed on to the next student. These folders were labeled with a color instead of a grade or number, as to avoid the stigma of reading levels. Each folder came with a key that gave the individual students the ability to grade their own work. All of these materials went into an old tomato box. And it was a success! The students in that country classroom began to not only focus on their education, but they began to take responsibility for their own education in a way rarely before seen. Within a week of schlepping around that tomato box, some of the students showed an improvement of up to three years in their reading abilities! After many rejections, Science Research Associates reached out to Dr. Parker in 1955, looking to add a reading component to their existing educational materials offering. In 1967, the SRA Reading Laboratory kit received its first 1,837 advanced orders at $39.95. Educators can still purchase a (much more technologically advanced) version of the SRA Reading Laboratory from McGraw-Hill Education. And to date, over one hundred million kits have been sold in over sixty-three countries. Dr. Don H. Parker died in 2000, but he changed how decades of children were taught to effectively read. And I personally suspect that this man is one of the reasons I, myself, fell in love with reading. Thank you, Dr. Parker! " ( link at 'https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4236407/posts').
So we may have the makings of a perfect storm. Our lodges need more men to support such an effort. Our kids need a stronger moral guide than WA state provides. We need to address and reverse the 'woke' in our population as a state. We need public interaction. And we're making picnic plans across the state. Were we to present an open invitation to the public to meet our various Masonic groups at a picnic, it's possible we can 'right this ship' and avoid the shipwreck on the horizon on our current path.
At the very least we should get some home-schoolers interest. But I'm guessing people are getting pretty fed up with things as they are today, and this provides a possible solution for some.
You're right, a lot of our Lodges have found great success with the Bikes for Books program (including those that give something other than bikes) and through it have built pretty good relationships with area schools, and goodwill with kids and parents.
Statistics I've seen show you're also right that students lost significant ground when the schools were closed during Covid.
In this country, Freemasonry has always stood for education of our youth, and perhaps there is something that Lodges can do to expand our literacy efforts further. I appreciate this information, and your presentation in Lodge about it last week.
My 40-year professional career was as a CPA owning a public accounting firm. Over those years, I served Masonic organizations as clients - lodges, a grand lodge, and some state and international Masonic organizations.
Because of my financial background, and as an active Mason, I was called upon many times to volunteer my expertise to offer advice, chair financial committees, install accounting software, train treasurers in accounting, write financial procedures, and sometimes serve as a treasurer.
I have seen the behavior Most Worshipful speaks of many times. I tend to characterize the situations into four categories; the good, the bad, the ugly, and “I can’t believe these guys are Masons.”
From my experiences the most contentious are those involving Masonic real estate. The aging property needs significant repairs and improvements and the lodge or other Masonic entity does not have sufficient funds to accomplish them. Or, the organization is just getting by with barely enough funds to pay the utility bills let alone maintain a proper maintenance schedule.
Both of these situations prompt the brothers to continually put on fund-raising events just to own the building and the real work of the lodge, Masonry, gets shoved aside and the time and energy of the members is spent raising money.
Any member suggesting that owning the real estate might not be a good idea and maybe selling and finding an appropriate place to rent, or, heaven forbid, merge with an organization that has a stronger financial footing, is immediately labeled a heretic, dismissed as a fool, and treated as uncaring. Trust me I know; I have been that guy multiple times!
I chaired a committee that spend a year analyzing building use, seeking advice from real estate attorneys and commercial developers, and build extensive organizational financial projections, to determine the best long-term direction for our building. We had an offer to purchase the property and the committee produced a report and recommended we sell. Our report was dismissed as incorrect, wild speculation, and I as chairman, was accused of having some secret financial incentive to sell.
In the financial situations involving lodge buildings, there is a deep sense of emotional and historical attachment to the building and the prevailing thought is that if we do not own a building, there is no lodge. This feeling causes unsound financial choices.
Many times, I have heard, “we can’t spend money on that, we have to make sure we have money for the future.” Yet, there is no plan for the future.
All I can offer as a solution is for all Masonic organizations to be better planners. A unified vision based on determining what is our purpose, who should benefit, what will we do to make it happen, and what resources will we commit to accomplish it. Sadly, this normally is not done.
Sorry for the long post, but over the years this has been the most frustrating subject for me. Thanks for letting me vent.
I watched, over the course of years, the Lodge nearest to my own, a Lodge filled with good men, destroy itself because it could not afford its building. As the problems with the building grew and financial resources shrank, the Lodge eventually did nothing at all but worry about that building. It kept that up until the Lodge finally collapsed, and it no longer exists.
They could have, instead sold that building when they realized that they couldn't afford it, and moved into my Lodge's building for their meetings. There is less than 5 miles between the two buildings.
My own Lodge might have a similar decision to make in the future. We've got commercial tenants, we can afford the building. But should we? It is a massive amount of work to manage, and far too large for our needs.
We could sell it for perhaps three million bucks. The Lodge immediately to our North has a really neat little building, perfectly sized for our needs. We could take that three million, invest 2.8 of it to ensure the Lodge's future financial stability and use 200K to make improvements to the Lodge building we would be moving into. It would require our members to drive 8 miles. (These financial figures are guesses, we've not done an appraisal.)
Elsewhere in this Jurisdiction we have a city that hosts three Lodge buildings, all of which need a financial boost. All three of those buildings are within less than two miles of each other. There is no reason at all why two of these shouldn't be sold and all the Lodges share one. Two other Lodge buildings are quite close to this cluster of three, within a few miles.
In north Seattle (a small geographical area) we have 12 Lodges meeting in 5 buildings. All of those buildings are in good shape and none are a financial struggle yet.
But, 4 of the 5 could be sold, and the largest one torn down for Masonic redevelopment. If those 12 Lodges then pooled their resources, a wonderful, modern, mixed use, building could be put up, that would be able to financially benefit instead of drain all of those Lodges. Parking underground, retail on the bottom, offices above that, apartments above those, and Masonry topping it all off. Those 12 Lodges do have enough financial resources to build out a structure like that.
Part of the trouble I think is that people forget why we have so darn many buildings. It isn't that our ancestors in Masonry were nuts, building Temples so close to each other, it is that modern transportation didn't exist when they were built.
In my first example above, the Lodge buildings were less than 5 miles apart, but when they were built, most of that distance was a horrible swamp. Now a freeway connects them.
In the second example, one can drive between the Lodge buildings in a couple of minutes. But when they were built the distance between them was interrupted by part of the Puget Sound. Now there is a bridge.
As you rightly point out, our buildings will destroy us, if we don't start looking at them through a business lens instead of an emotional lens.
Preach! I am tired of Lodges playing Investment Firm. It's disgraceful to accumulate rather than use resources.
A note though, as I understand it, in New York it is unconstitutional (and possibly illegal) for Trustees to have a separate account they can access at will. In an emergency it would be more a matter of forgiveness than permission.
Oringinal story did not reflect the bulk of the 'treasury' of this lodge is from the sale of a lodge building years ago, and is not available for general funds without conversion and taxes.
I get that, but it's still the Brothers' money to be USED, not banked ad infinitum.
I've seen Old Timers waiting for that perfect property to magically appear and be bought someday, always thinking to the past instead of a real future. In another Lodge I've seen a building go to $h!t while sitting on half a million dollars, solving every problem with duct tape and scratch-and-dent mechanicals for generations.
Even if most of the Lodge's funds are in investments, I would say it's best to regularly run a deficit budget to absorb and use most of the returns from such investments. And if the amount is really significant, LIQUIDATE IT with meaningful projects and upgrades.
Or we can just keep playing Banker for that raining day while we're already treading water.
Agreed.
If Lodges don't use their funds to improve Masonry, or to improve their community, then it seems they have no reason for them.
We should be very prudent financial managers. But there is a big difference between managing our money and hoarding it.
Lodges in this Jurisdiction do sell their buildings from time to time, and then go on to use those moneys as desired including as general funds. There are no particular regulatory or tax issues that would prevent a Lodge from doing so.
If the Lodge's proceeds from the sale are somehow restricted, that restriction must have been put into place by the Lodge.
Granting that the Lodge may have done something like that though, it does beg the question, if the Lodge can't use the funds to improve its current building, and can't use the funds to improve the experience of its Masons, and can't use the funds to provide financial relief to the children of Masons, then why would it need the funds at all? What would be the point of holding them?
That is interesting. Here, while the Grand Lodge does not really regulate Temple Boards, there are some guidelines or best practices. Generally it is thought proper that a Temple Board hold enough financial resources to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of with the building over the course of a year. It holds those funds in its own name, and spends them on its own authority.
In practice, how it works at my Lodge (I've been on the Temple Board for a great many years now) is we have large commercial tenants (a law firm and an accounting firm) so the building has to be functional at all times. The Lodge ensures that the Temple Board always has enough money to handle whatever emergency might arise with the building, so that the Board can move very quickly. When there is a profit derived from the building (not often as the commercial tenants subsidize the Masonic tenants) that profit is remitted to the Lodge on a yearly basis.
But the Temple Board never has to seek permission from the Lodge to manage the building or take care of problems with it.
Other Temple Boards, in buildings without commercial tenants might well have less funds on hand to handle emergencies, because without those tenants time is not nearly as sensitive.
We don't have Temple Boards in the same sense here. Either the Lodge owns it or it's owned by a completely separate legal entity that has a board made up of representatives one or more Lodges.
In New York State, all this sis subject to the Benevolent Laws. The Constitutions defer to it and so we don't have specific Masonic laws regarding temple ownership outside the Lodge being the direct owner of the real estate.
At least this is my understanding of it.
We are a bit different, probably due to differences in State Law.
Our Temple Boards are separate corporations from our Lodges, and those Boards own the Real Estate. The Lodge in turn owns the Temple Corporation. Essentially they are Real Estate Holding Corps.
I would like to ask permission to reprint this article in our trestleboards and utilize it in my DD activities please.
Yes, of course, please feel free to use it as desired. I'm honored that you found it valuable.
I was a member at that meeting, which ran long for the amount of items covered. So when I stood to make a proposal, I was tired, and anxious to get home. And I had a vision in mind that would take more time to explain than politeness would allow.
I mentioned that Washington natives tested in the top 1/3 of the country for IQ. Yeah, hard to believe.
We are also in the situation we found ourselves after WW II - schools were decimated of teachers who went to war, and we lost reading skills for 3 years. Today we have shot ourselves in our feet with 'woke' education and CoVID practices that have damaged our kids as much as WW II.
And guess what this lodge has - a Bikes for Books program for the local schools. So the schools already know us. (neighbor across the street is riding one of our Bikes4Books as I write this). In fact, Bikes for Books can be found across the entire state in our lodges. So clearly the public can see how much we value education for our kids. So it would be a natural extension of our existing relationship with public schools to expand the program to allow access to additional reading material. It has a name. The SRA Reading Laboratory. Assembled decades ago, so it's free from 'woke'. But it uses the rainbow of colors to hide reading level, and tests are pass / fail-retest.
"The premise? This giant box of gloriousness was full of stories, each one assigned a particular color based on developmental milestones. Students initially took a brief test to determine what color (reading) level they should start at and then were given a story on card stock labeled with that color. After reading the story, you answered a series of reading comprehension questions related to what you just read. Successfully make your way through enough of these stories and you got to move on to the next color in the box. Educators used this as a way to both teach reading comprehension and to get a better understanding of the reading levels of their students. And let’s be honest, the air of competition helped some of us lazier students.
The SRA Reading Laboratory was designed in 1950 in rural Florida by Dr. Don H. Parker. A thirty-two children schoolhouse was the origin of an educational tool that would last for over 50 years. His previous experience in the psychological field would give him insight that made teaching all children from the same material seem antithetical to his knowledge of the developing minds of students. Driving through the countryside with an overloaded car, Parker visited K-12 students throughout rural Florida to administer reading tests. Faced with the daunting task of having to hand-grade 3,000 tests, Parker enlisted some of his school’s most intelligent seniors and they began to score the tests. In plotting the scores, the traditional bell curve began to materialize, giving his theory about the role psychology plays in education merit. Individual differences in learning capacity and speed had to be taken into account if educators were going to successfully raise a generation of readers. Dr. Parker’s school did not have the budget necessary to purchase entirely new and separate workbooks for each of the students based on their individual developmental levels. However, there was a series of workbooks containing 40 lessons each that could be purchased for a dollar. Parker proceeded to divide each of the lessons up into folders to be completed and then passed on to the next student. These folders were labeled with a color instead of a grade or number, as to avoid the stigma of reading levels. Each folder came with a key that gave the individual students the ability to grade their own work. All of these materials went into an old tomato box. And it was a success! The students in that country classroom began to not only focus on their education, but they began to take responsibility for their own education in a way rarely before seen. Within a week of schlepping around that tomato box, some of the students showed an improvement of up to three years in their reading abilities! After many rejections, Science Research Associates reached out to Dr. Parker in 1955, looking to add a reading component to their existing educational materials offering. In 1967, the SRA Reading Laboratory kit received its first 1,837 advanced orders at $39.95. Educators can still purchase a (much more technologically advanced) version of the SRA Reading Laboratory from McGraw-Hill Education. And to date, over one hundred million kits have been sold in over sixty-three countries. Dr. Don H. Parker died in 2000, but he changed how decades of children were taught to effectively read. And I personally suspect that this man is one of the reasons I, myself, fell in love with reading. Thank you, Dr. Parker! " ( link at 'https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/4236407/posts').
So we may have the makings of a perfect storm. Our lodges need more men to support such an effort. Our kids need a stronger moral guide than WA state provides. We need to address and reverse the 'woke' in our population as a state. We need public interaction. And we're making picnic plans across the state. Were we to present an open invitation to the public to meet our various Masonic groups at a picnic, it's possible we can 'right this ship' and avoid the shipwreck on the horizon on our current path.
At the very least we should get some home-schoolers interest. But I'm guessing people are getting pretty fed up with things as they are today, and this provides a possible solution for some.
Thank you for this Brother, I appreciate it.
You're right, a lot of our Lodges have found great success with the Bikes for Books program (including those that give something other than bikes) and through it have built pretty good relationships with area schools, and goodwill with kids and parents.
Statistics I've seen show you're also right that students lost significant ground when the schools were closed during Covid.
In this country, Freemasonry has always stood for education of our youth, and perhaps there is something that Lodges can do to expand our literacy efforts further. I appreciate this information, and your presentation in Lodge about it last week.
My 40-year professional career was as a CPA owning a public accounting firm. Over those years, I served Masonic organizations as clients - lodges, a grand lodge, and some state and international Masonic organizations.
Because of my financial background, and as an active Mason, I was called upon many times to volunteer my expertise to offer advice, chair financial committees, install accounting software, train treasurers in accounting, write financial procedures, and sometimes serve as a treasurer.
I have seen the behavior Most Worshipful speaks of many times. I tend to characterize the situations into four categories; the good, the bad, the ugly, and “I can’t believe these guys are Masons.”
From my experiences the most contentious are those involving Masonic real estate. The aging property needs significant repairs and improvements and the lodge or other Masonic entity does not have sufficient funds to accomplish them. Or, the organization is just getting by with barely enough funds to pay the utility bills let alone maintain a proper maintenance schedule.
Both of these situations prompt the brothers to continually put on fund-raising events just to own the building and the real work of the lodge, Masonry, gets shoved aside and the time and energy of the members is spent raising money.
Any member suggesting that owning the real estate might not be a good idea and maybe selling and finding an appropriate place to rent, or, heaven forbid, merge with an organization that has a stronger financial footing, is immediately labeled a heretic, dismissed as a fool, and treated as uncaring. Trust me I know; I have been that guy multiple times!
I chaired a committee that spend a year analyzing building use, seeking advice from real estate attorneys and commercial developers, and build extensive organizational financial projections, to determine the best long-term direction for our building. We had an offer to purchase the property and the committee produced a report and recommended we sell. Our report was dismissed as incorrect, wild speculation, and I as chairman, was accused of having some secret financial incentive to sell.
In the financial situations involving lodge buildings, there is a deep sense of emotional and historical attachment to the building and the prevailing thought is that if we do not own a building, there is no lodge. This feeling causes unsound financial choices.
Many times, I have heard, “we can’t spend money on that, we have to make sure we have money for the future.” Yet, there is no plan for the future.
All I can offer as a solution is for all Masonic organizations to be better planners. A unified vision based on determining what is our purpose, who should benefit, what will we do to make it happen, and what resources will we commit to accomplish it. Sadly, this normally is not done.
Sorry for the long post, but over the years this has been the most frustrating subject for me. Thanks for letting me vent.
You write Truth, Brother, Thank You!
I watched, over the course of years, the Lodge nearest to my own, a Lodge filled with good men, destroy itself because it could not afford its building. As the problems with the building grew and financial resources shrank, the Lodge eventually did nothing at all but worry about that building. It kept that up until the Lodge finally collapsed, and it no longer exists.
They could have, instead sold that building when they realized that they couldn't afford it, and moved into my Lodge's building for their meetings. There is less than 5 miles between the two buildings.
My own Lodge might have a similar decision to make in the future. We've got commercial tenants, we can afford the building. But should we? It is a massive amount of work to manage, and far too large for our needs.
We could sell it for perhaps three million bucks. The Lodge immediately to our North has a really neat little building, perfectly sized for our needs. We could take that three million, invest 2.8 of it to ensure the Lodge's future financial stability and use 200K to make improvements to the Lodge building we would be moving into. It would require our members to drive 8 miles. (These financial figures are guesses, we've not done an appraisal.)
Elsewhere in this Jurisdiction we have a city that hosts three Lodge buildings, all of which need a financial boost. All three of those buildings are within less than two miles of each other. There is no reason at all why two of these shouldn't be sold and all the Lodges share one. Two other Lodge buildings are quite close to this cluster of three, within a few miles.
In north Seattle (a small geographical area) we have 12 Lodges meeting in 5 buildings. All of those buildings are in good shape and none are a financial struggle yet.
But, 4 of the 5 could be sold, and the largest one torn down for Masonic redevelopment. If those 12 Lodges then pooled their resources, a wonderful, modern, mixed use, building could be put up, that would be able to financially benefit instead of drain all of those Lodges. Parking underground, retail on the bottom, offices above that, apartments above those, and Masonry topping it all off. Those 12 Lodges do have enough financial resources to build out a structure like that.
Part of the trouble I think is that people forget why we have so darn many buildings. It isn't that our ancestors in Masonry were nuts, building Temples so close to each other, it is that modern transportation didn't exist when they were built.
In my first example above, the Lodge buildings were less than 5 miles apart, but when they were built, most of that distance was a horrible swamp. Now a freeway connects them.
In the second example, one can drive between the Lodge buildings in a couple of minutes. But when they were built the distance between them was interrupted by part of the Puget Sound. Now there is a bridge.
As you rightly point out, our buildings will destroy us, if we don't start looking at them through a business lens instead of an emotional lens.