The Starke County Tourism Board, which has been in the news recently surrounding a misappropriation of funds incident, has recently reorganized.
Taking over the President’s position is Julie Dessauer. Dessauer replaces Rich Wieczorek. Other board officers are Vice President John Hensler, Secretary Thom Morin, and Treasurer Tabitha Dillner. Wieczorek remains on the board as a voting member, but not an officer.
In the first meeting of the new year, the Starke County Commissioners reorganized and made appointments to several boards. Kathy Norem was elected as the President of the Board of Commissioners with Dan Bridegroom as Vice President and Jennifer Davis as Secretary. The vote for commissioner Norem was unanimous, and she thanked her predecessor, Dan Bridegroom, for his three years of service as Board President. Martin Lucas was retained as the county attorney.
“We came out approximately $3,000 ahead of last year. Our total came out to about $10,400, which is great,” said Dessauer. “I definitely wanted to make sure that we did some special thank yous for WKVI, first off, Century Link, and Osinski’s Auction Service. Those were our three major components in pulling the auction off, and then of course there was all of the business participants that donated everything.”
And how about those Bears tickets? They brought in almost $600.00 for four tickets. Dessauer was happy with that, partly because she’s a Bears fan.
“They absolutely did, that was wonderful. I know that there was some fighting over them and everybody was really happy to get them,” said Dessauer.
The $50,000 campaign goal is almost in sight, according to Dessauer.
“A typical campaign would close out the end of December. Ours has typically ran a little longer than that,” Dessauer said. “I’m hoping to close out by the end of January, and we are still a little bit shy of the goal so we want to make sure that we do a little boost there and we still have appointments for businesses that want to do an employee campaign.”
Congratulations to Starke United, and a big thank you for the people who have supported the campaign.
Executive Director Julie Dessauer reminds those who bid that you may pay and pick up your items at the Starke United office at 52 West Lake Street after 10:00 a.m. today. Dessauer will release the final results of the auction later this week.
Starke United’s Board has approved the reallocation of funds to enable Community Services to provide the matching funds for 125 meals to the homebound elderly, matching funds for 133 hours of homemaker service to the elderly and disabled and for the preparation and printing of the Starke County Resource Directory. The Starke United Board also approved $1,500 for the food pantry in July after allocating $2,500 for the pantry in April.
The annual Starke United meeting was held last night at the Community Services of Starke County Building in Knox. The emcee for the evening, Megan Hamand, introduced the speaker of the evening, Marvin McLaughlin, of North Judson, who blended humor with an appeal to support the organization. Mr. McLaughlin set the stage for the rest of the evening which included the announcement of the Volunteer of the Year, Marilyn Zabinski.
Starke United welcomes one of its own into the position of executive director. Julie Dessauer, who has been a part of the Starke United Executive Board since 2007, will begin as director for the organization on March 7th.
Mike Charbonneau, Vice Chair of Leadership for Starke United, said he thinks Dessauer will be a great asset to the organization.
“I and Todd Zeltwanger (Starke United Chairperson) both feel that Julie is a very qualified candidate,” he said. “She has tremendous support and respect in the community and can help us bring this organization to where we want it to be.”
