The first meeting of the 2026 TriTrogs Executive Committee started around 6:30pm at Taylor’s house. Grotto Chair Taylor Tibbs led the meeting, and in attendance were Vice Chair Matthew Brown, Webmasters Matthew Weiss and Jacob Gonzalez, Treasurer Stephan Francke joining remotely, and Matthew “Zeke” Van Fossen taking minutes. For the purpose of the minutes, “we” should be understood to mean any or all of the members of the grotto.
Initial discussion was about the grotto trip projected for late summer. The officers want to set a weekend in August as soon as possible. For camping and caving, we might see if we can stay with RASS, and then take groups to one of the nearby caves.
Matthew Brown will lead the March and April meetings while Taylor is absent. We will need people to do presentations on their trips and projects in the coming months (and always). The program for March is set.
The Executive Committee discussed whether or not there would be a July meeting, and what the nature of that meeting might be. There was some assumption that we would have a non-meeting gathering in lieu of a meeting, considering that the NSS convention will be taking place, but since the convention (July 6-10) should not interfere with the regular grotto meeting (July 28), we could meet as normal, or we might meet at a different location. The officers are going to see what people are doing and make a decision later.
The Treasurer said that we have money in the bank account. Currently, the grotto only wants payments in cash or by check because of issues with PayPal, which we are likely about to dump for an alternative service, and Stephan may have found something. The grotto is set to put money towards our annual trip, the upcoming project in Low Moor Cave, and the end-of-year donation. The Treasurer also said that individuals paid for t-shirts in 2025, but apparently did not receive those t-shirts at or around the time of the grotto trip. The officers favor doing another t-shirt this year, with the proceeds going toward the purchase of loaner gear. The 2025 t-shirt sale raised $123.
The new officers were set up with WordPress accounts, and email forwarding. There was, for the sake of awareness and prevention, discussion about scammers and bots picking up email addresses and the names of the grotto officers and trying to spoof our identities and ask for money. Stephan says it happens about three times a month now, and they’re not fooling him. There was further discussion about what measures the Webmasters might take to obfuscate our contact information to prevent “easy pickins” while still remaining accessible.
Jacob wants trip reports to post on our website, tritrogs.org, so the world can see that we are an active organization. The Executive Committee brainstormed ways to incentivize the posting of trip reports. It was agreed that there will be some sort of year-end prize involved, and people can increase their chances of winning a prize or prizes by increasing the number of trip reports they post to tritrogs.org in 2026. Candy was part of the discussion.
Facebook group administration will be more limited from now on. The Executive Committee discussed Discord administration, mainly with regard to sensitive information. Matthew Weiss will look into limiting access for new (yet to be trusted) users to general chat, and the officers talked about how this would need to precede any possible increase in outward visibility or access to our Discord server. The Webmasters are going to look at our website in general and make some improvements.
The Secretary learned that he has to report meeting attendance to the museum, and he is awaiting that contact information.
Future agenda items include planning for the grotto trip in August, and also whether we should make any changes to the Constitution with regard to the Executive Committee (how many are on it, and what are their roles) and elections (when and how can they be conducted), and what those changes would be. The plan is to establish a committee of inclined members.
The next meeting of the TriTrogs Executive Committee was set for Tuesday May 12 at 6:30pm, and the first one ended at about 9pm.