Once a year, CSAC throws an event for about 800 of our closest friends. But the Annual Meeting is much more than a typical convention. It’s an official CSAC Business Meeting where we elect our new Officers. It’s a chance for our Policy Committees to discuss and possibly take a position on important issues that affect our counties and our constituents. The Annual Meeting is an opportunity to hear from inspiring speakers, subject-matter-experts, and colleagues and peers from the County Family.

We hope it’s also a chance for County Supervisors, CAOs and Senior Staff to network with peers from other counties, exchange ideas and learn from each other. We changed the timing of some of the meetings and other workshops just a bit this year—trying to reduce overlapping events and provide more informal networking time. The initial feedback about that has been positive.

For CSAC Staff—the Annual Meeting is a whirlwind week of activity. It’s a chance for us to interact with our members, listen to your concerns, hear your points of view and to learn from your perspective. Of course, we are always open to that kind of discussion, but it seems to happen a little more spontaneously at the Annual Meeting.

To be honest, with so many moving parts, and so many things that could go wrong, well, it’s a little bit like putting on play for a live audience, with very little chance to rehearse. We take pride in producing a good meeting, and that means a lot of advance planning. But it also means reacting to things you can’t necessarily plan for as they crop up, and hopefully, well before they cause any problems.

If you promise not to tell anyone else, I will let you know that, there were a few minor glitches, but for the most part, we were able to deal with them before they became “visible” to anyone else, and we think the meeting went pretty well. If you were there, you should have gotten an email with a link to an on-line survey. Please take a few minutes to respond to the survey. We really would appreciate your feedback so we can hopefully do a little better next time.

If you couldn’t make it this year, please take a look at the video we produced about our 120th Annual Meeting. You can’t completely compress four days into two minutes, but the video will give you an idea of what to expect next year, when CSAC gathers for our 121st Annual Meeting in Monterey.