04/07/2026
Good Afternoon,
As things go on, people get busy and priorities have to shift sometimes. It has come to our attention that we need to steer the ship and get our chapter back on track. I want to update everybody on previous events that have happened over the last 6 months and where we are headed. You can also find this on our website where the meeting minutes are posted.
October 2025; multiple messages were sent out along with this meeting to announce that all chairs on the E-Board are open to election. Nomination processes were described on our website.
November 2025; Voting took place virtually over the course of 2 weeks. Messages were sent out regarding this process. We had a fair system that ensured only paying members were voting and there were no double votes. This led to some shift in the board.
President - Sawyer Titus
Vice President - Bobby Mccue
Treasurer - Lee Thompson
Secretary - Ted Klovanick (Previously Richie Bailiff)
Trustee - Jacob Shelton (Previously Matt Carlson)
Trustee - Caleb Obney (Previously Logan Savitsky)
Trustee - Matt Lukowski (Previously Juan Levya)
Congratulations to the new board and thank you for the previous board for your service and dedication while trying to get the reboot of the Suncoast FOOLs off the ground.
During this meeting we also gave away two tickets to Orlando Fire Conference. To qualify, you had to be a member and be in attendance. Each member, besides the E-Board, was given a ticket on arrival and two tickets were pulled at the end of the night.
December-March; This is where life took over for a lot of the board and we were not able to dedicate the time needed. During this period the Suncoast FOOLS made one donation to a GoFundMe for a local fire family.
The FOOLs also provided dinner to 2 different crews on 2 different occasions. These meals were provided the shift after they had traumatic pediatric calls. A lesson that was taken away from Local 2546's peer support team was people don't always want to talk, but providing a meal would allow them to not have to worry about an unnecessary stress while having time to decompress from that call.
March 2026; an E-Board meeting was held to discuss the roadmap of the next year with the current board.
The Golf Tournament will be coming again this year and the planning will begin taking place in the next few weeks.
We have created a pilot program for a live fire class at Englewood Fire Training Center. We will be doing this on April 26, 2026. Our goal is to provide Live Fire Hands on Training to our membership at the lowest cost possible and to host this quarterly. The pilot program is to make sure that we have a proven program and have the kinks worked out prior to selling it as a class.
The Art of Reading Smoke will be coming back on October 13/14. The Elks Lodge in Venice offered us free use of the space if we use their caterer. We are working with them now to get this dialed in. Once pricing is figured out then we will open up registration. As always, we are not here to make profit but offer classes at the most reasonable price possible.
Merchandise was discussed again and we are working on a handful of designs which will be put on a shopify type of online store. This helps us not have left over merchandise that we can't sell and we do not have to worry about the overhead of merchandise. Standby for now until we get this setup.
April 2026; Currently working on updating and ordering new FOOLs cards for all active members which is about 80. These all have to be done individually and is time consuming. Once cards are received in the mail, we will host a meeting to hand them out and catch up.
I wanted to make sure this got out to provide transparency of how funds are being allocated as well as the work that is done in the background.
Thank you for being a FOOL,
Bobby McCue
