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------- by William Gale PHYSICAL Twenty acres of land have been purchased near Austin, Texas. Two master plans are under consideration. One places buildings in inward facing clusters, the other places them along the perimeter facing inwards. The cluster plan allows more use of the land. The perimeter plan gives every house a view of the lovely oak woods. Both plans allow thirty feet between buildings for fire safety. The first buildings can and will be sited so that either plan can be followed thereafter. The easement to the west side of the property had no name. Even though this is now just a dirt track (road would be overstating its use), it now bears the glorious name "Millenial Way". Our address is 135 Millenial Way. We have yet to contact the post office to find out just what our mail address will be (likely Route foo, Box baz...). An order for electricity has been placed with Bluebonnet Electric. They have made a site visit, and have started the process to get an easement needed to bring electric wires across the land to the south of us. These poles will be needed by the phone company also. There is an Aqua Water company meter on the site. We will need to pay Aqua to decide if it will be satisfactory for a few houses to start with. Southwestern Bell won't take an order until a house with electricity is on the premises. Once that happens, the order will be delayed while they string cable along the electric poles which will have been in place. This will probably take a month. We plan to use mobile phones for a short time. We are planning to use aerobic digestion for a small amount of waste conversion to start with. The water output from aerobic digestion can be used on the surface and will support gardens or garden/fish-pond combination. Mike Gepner sells and installs these. They cost about the same as septic disposal of waste, but have small annual maintenance cost, while giving the benefit of surface use of the water, which septic output is far to septic to allow. We have names of several haulers for solid waste removal. We plan to contact them as we begin moving in. We do not know whether any of the haulers takes stuff to recyclers. We need to upgrade the dirt track to a gravel road. However we will need the cooperation of the neighbor to the south. This kind of thing is much more easily done in person, so we plan to wait until we are present to do this. LEGAL Drafts of the the three basic legal documents, the Articles of Incorporation, the Bylaws, and the Standard Lease have been completed and posted to fmf-lbc. This had been the main activity during the past quarter. These drafts have been sent to a lawyer in Lubbock with experience in cooperatives, and a local lawyer with experience in real estate, including development. The local lawyer has said that the Lease appears to be a standard lease. Sweeter words could not be heard. With the Lease fairly well pinned down, we now plan to pursue the cooperatives lawyer. The land is currently owned by William Gale, since there is no corporation. Insurance for him was located from a company that writes commercial insurance. This will allow development (electric, aerobic digestion, etc.) to take place if the timing on the development is before the land is tranferred to the corporation. We expect that the same company will write insurance for the cooperative. The Venture Capital corporation needs redrafting for Texas law. FINANCIAL With the nature of the security that we can offer now clear, people who once expressed the possibility of making loans to settlers were contacted. The results were disappointing, in that during one year, all but two had lost either the ability or the willingness to make loans. It appears that the notion of asking far enough in advance to allow people to plan is mistaken, that we should ask when we need the money. If we have a similar response to our inquiry of a year ago, then we will have enough capital. Gale offers to hold a mortgage at 0% interest with the principal payable at $2000 per member who sets a new high for membership. The likely near term settlers have been surveyed, and all appear to have at least the minimum cash required for equity. SOCIAL One likely settler is able to move any time, but not able to be the only settler. Two expect to move by June 1998. One and a family have dates conditional on external events. We will start when settlers can move in, which will probably be June.
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