Florida Van Council (FVC) and Southern Van Council (SVC) officers held a regional council meeting in Tallahassee on February 25, 1978. The meeting was called to discuss items of mutual interest between the two councils.

        The discussion fell into three broad categories; council policies, truck-ins and council newsletters.

        COUNCIL POLICIES: Some of the FVC policies discussed were FVC officers holding successive terms in office, issuing of dash plaques on a yearly basis and publishing of roll call votes at meetings in the FVC newsletter. It was noted that SVC holds meetings every other month and, in general, holds the meetings where a new club has joined the council. This works well for SVC as it has 15 clubs at present and this is feasible.

        SVC officers personally check out the campground to be used at any SVC sanctioned event to guarantee its adequacy for a truck-in and SVC membership cards are validated with the corporate seal.

        TRUCK-INS: SVC has adopted the policy of trying, where practical, to schedule events so that there is a minimum of conflicts with FVC sanctioned events. This will allow members of both councils who want to truck a lot the opportunity for a wide selection of good truck-in to attend. Some problems discussed regarding truck-ins were the need for a standard set of van judging guidelines, hiring a band and having it cop out at the last minute, council members failing to pre-register early for events, and the old familiar song of having only 6 or 7 members in a club doing all the hustling to get door prizes, etc. for the event. SVC noted that lots of people don't carry enough cash to buy all the vendors goodies they want at a truck-in and the vendors are missing a lot by not accepting major credit cards at the truck-ins. The possibility of a joint SVC-FVC truck-in was discussed but it was felt that might be too big an event to find adequate facilities for.

        COUNCIL NEWSLETTER: The importance of the newsletter as being the most valuable media for providing communication was discussed as well as the difficulty of getting it started. The conclusion was there's no substitute for six months of so of hard plugging away until the members start responding with some inputs of their own.

        Both FVC and SVC officers felt the meeting was extremely valuable to both councils and discussed the possibility of holding another meeting sometime, perhaps a larger meeting with invitations to the club president to attend.

Attendees: