JT REP'S REPORT FROM CLUB BOARD MEETING

(Apologies for the delay in providing this update. Not Kieron's fault in any way. GF)

A couple of weeks ago, Kieron Dempsey attended his first PTFC board meeting as a director of the club representing the Jags Trust and its members. With the Trust having been absent from the boardroom for several months, Kieron was keen to re-establish our connection with the other directors and to assure them of the benefits the club gains from having a fan presence there to contribute to the debate.

A few formalities had to be taken care of first, signing up to confidentiality agreements and dealing with internal matters involving staff issues etc. It has to be remembered that Kieron is now a director of the club with legal responsibilities to the club as a company, in addition to his role of representing and reporting back to the Trust. It can be a difficult balancing act, but Kieron assures us that no undue pressure was put on him to hide anything from the members other than confidential employee matters and such like.

We'll give a summary here of the main points which came up for discussion.

Rangers game ticketing

The meeting took place on the Thursday before the Rangers game. In fact, the tickets were only delivered while the meeting was in progress. The club has tried to learn from problems of the past and to marry together the practicalities of selling tickets in a short time yet trying to minimise problems for season ticket holders. It was noted that with the match being on television there was an additional source of money coming to both clubs. Unfortunately, for the Alba cup, there would be no extra money if game is televised.

Stadium development

The club are still exploring development options with the same people who have been named in connection with this in recent seasons. There have been, by necessity, some alterations to their thinking, but nothing that we don’t already know about.

Minute's silence - review of policy

No change was made to the club’s policy on the minute's silence or applause. They felt that to change this would create more problems with regard to who was eligible. They also didn’t like the idea of an annual ceremony, as had been suggested by a number of people and has been introduced at several clubs. Kieron suggested they could hold it on Remembrance Day, but it was still felt that the present policy should remain in place, as would the practice of putting an article in the Club Programme and website.

(There has already been considerable debate on this question and the Trust would like to take some more opinions from our members before letting it go. We will be putting out a formal request for views on it and hope people will help us to gather more of a sense of the feelings among the support about how best to handle these sensitive issues.)

Club website

The club are exploring options on making further improvements to the website to make it more informative for fans and to widen out its use as a tool of communication with fans.

Jags Trust

Kieron addressed the board on a number of issues: concerns over the ‘political’ nature of the Trust and any perceived distrust of the Trust and its motives. He explained the reasons why we had to be 'political' in a very broad sense and made it clear that as supporters of PTFC we wanted the Trust to raise money, which previously had not been the case, and that this would be of benefit to the club.  He raised the issue of share purchase - ALL attending were fine with this and the matter will be presented at the club’s AGM and when it has been formally approved the paperwork can be sorted out.

Finally, Kieron suggested that it would be a good idea for the full boards of both PTFC and the Trust to meet and this was agreed in principle. Commenting after the meeting, he was very positive about the experience and stated, "There seemed a genuine willingness to work with us."

The next club board meeting takes place this Thursday, October 9th.