Club Membership

Before you really attempt to resolve this determine if the property owner is unhappy about the number of people at the site or he really wants to limit the club. There is a significant difference as the former is a valid concern and the latter is an entirely different problem.
Maybe you should significantly raise your dues. That will discourage some of your membership, but many of the non-flyers will leave. However this is not the only solution available to you.
You could limit the numbers of folks at the flying field at any given time by some sort of 'card entry' system. When all the cards are out, other members are not allowed. Put a board by the entry with numbered slots and the members come in and put a membership card in a slot. When the slots are full, you cannot come in.
Good luck
> Here is a hippotheoretical question. :) Say your club only allows 50 > members because of limited space and the property owner wants it only to be > 50 people. Only about 20 of them fly regularly. About 10 of them almost > never show up at all to fly. Say you even have a couple guys who have been > members for 14 years and never flown or shown up to the field during that > time. Each year we have to turn away 1 or 2 people because there is no room > for new membership. What do you do? > > -- > Normen Strobel > snipped-for-privacy@zoominternet.nospam.net > > > > > >

Simply add a minimum flight hours per year rule. It is a safety issue as well. Is a pilot that flies once in 3 years safe?

Is a pilot that flies once in 3 years safe?
Um - yes! You can only crash when you're flying :-)

Have an "inactive" membership. Dr.1 Driver "There's a Hun in the sun!"

The lifeblood of any organization is the people who pay and never use the facilities, whatever they may be. Don't want to lose them. You need to know, as someone already mentioned, if the field owner means 50 members of all sorts or 50 members who fly or 50 members at the field at one time. Does he review your roster?

we have the same kind of cap on our membership each of the past two years we have approached the 50 member limit by the end of the summer so far i don't think we have actually reached our cap since there are several members that no longer fly and a large number that do not fly often, our cap is kinda flexible based on how many people are actually active and flying it also helps that our land owner is our field marshall and one of the big driving forces in the club he is blessed with more than his fair share of common sense and sense of fair play the intent of our cap is to limit the number of active pilots to what the facilities can safely support since our facility is in our land owners back yard it is very easy for him to keep tabs on how many people are using the airfield, and he makes the call on the membership cap interpetation
the suggestion to speak with your land owner is a good one since you only need a few more membership slots ask for the cap to be bumped up by a very modest number take your club roster and have the members names highlighted that have not flown for 1yr, 2yrs, 3yrs .... the worst that could happen is to be told no
good luck charlie