| —PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE—
Challenging Times
By Del Eulberg, Major General (Ret.), USAF
| The national presidential election is now behind us and no matter how you voted—which I hope you did—our fiscal challenges are daunting. All exit polls were clear that invigorating our economy and dealing with the national debt should be our highest priorities. Sixteen trillion dollars in debt is a significant challenge—it’s actually larger than our gross domestic product, the market price of all the goods and services produced in our nation in a year. In plain English, it is like having a credit card balance that exceeds your family’s annual income. I could go on and on about this but you have heard it all and are probably just as concerned as I am about what the path ahead will be. |
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By the time this column is published, Congress and President Obama will have decided what actions to take about the “fiscal cliff” and hopefully will have a bipartisan agreement about how to deal with spending and taxes. I’m optimistic that a solution will be found because the American people will eventually demand our political leadership get the job done. Whatever comes out of the political negotiations, we all know this will not be fixed overnight and will require shared sacrifice by all Americans as well as significant changes in our federal government.
PHMA is also not immune to these challenges. The DoD budget reductions this past year have already been felt in reduced TDY and funding for training. In addition, the amount of guidance concerning conference/training attendance this past year has been unprecedented in my experience. The PHMA leadership and our board have had numerous sessions with the services’ housing leadership over the potential impact to our training programs as well as our annual PDS scheduled for January 2013 in New Orleans. Jon Moore sent a very detailed letter to our membership explaining the tightening budgets, guidance, and potential impacts to PHMA, which eventually led to our decision to cancel our annual PDS in New Orleans. This was not an easy decision but one that had to be made. Given the uncertainty around how our political leadership will deal with sequestration and the expiring Bush tax cuts, PHMA and the services housing leadership had little choice.
Our focus as an association must now be clearly concentrated on the future. Given the fact that federal budgets will have to be reduced for many years, how can PHMA perform our mission more efficiently and remain relevant in meeting our members’ training needs? We did an evaluation of how we were performing to date and revalidated the fact that we have made many changes over the years to ensure we were providing first-class training at a very affordable price. Not resting on our laurels, we explored options on how we can further lower training costs by reducing the number of conference days or eliminating events that were not directly related to training (e.g., President’s reception, etc.). We had to get back to basics and are working hard to ensure we have a focused agenda with high-impact training for our 2014 PDS in Denver. However, we must all advocate for this training and convince our military leadership that the training provided is a good investment. Given the importance of housing to the quality of life of our military members and their families, I’m confident that we will be together in Denver.
In addition to our annual PDS, we explored many other options to help our membership. In the coming year, we are doubling down on our outreach efforts at the national level but also challenging our Regions and Chapters to do the same. We will establish virtual seminars on housing topics; improve our website to enhance relevance to our membership; add a Community Page to our website where our members can ask questions and find/share workable solutions to common challenges; continue to provide training at selected bases; continue our award-winning Defense Communities magazine with relevant articles from our membership; as well as continue our awards programs and scholarships. The status quo is no longer acceptable, and it is time for all of us to step up and challenge each other to find better, more efficient ways to do business. PHMA is as strong as ever and has a proud history of service to our membership and that will not change. There is a lot of work to do—let’s do it together and I know we will be better for it. God Bless.
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| Del Eulberg is Vice President, Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. General Eulberg retired from the Air Force in 2009 as The Civil Engineer, HQ USAF, where he was responsible for installation support for 166 installations worldwide. |
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