[Steve W]

I believe that the problems that people are having has nothing to do with the increase. The problem is with sponsors. I work in the real world in the field of communications. As the market goes up and down so does our work load. Businesses will spend money if they have it. This last 2 years I have seen a decline in spending and on these boards I have seen posts of teams saying that their sponsors have had to cut back and even some of sponsors going under. This makes raising money a little tougher. There is the point that veteran teams sometimes get lazy when they have some big sponsors. When the money starts to dry up then they have problems finding more. Our team does fairly well. We are probably in the top 1/3 of teams in the way of funding. We are always trying to get new leads and bring in new sponsors. It takes a lot of time and effort but is worth it. The fact that we are Canadian also makes it a bit tougher. That $2000.00 increase that you see is about $2800.00 CDN.

As for FIRST raising prices, I say if they need it to continue to provide the excellent program that they have, then do it. I have seen FIRST trying to reduce costs and I do not believe that there is a lot of wasted money. The staff have been overworked for years as they try to keep staffing to a minimum.

If we must lose some teams then I really feel the loss. I would hope that if there are a few strapped teams, rather than folding, that they would join together an make a single team and share resources. FIRST is too good of a program to leave. I hope that business picks up soon so that the sponsorship money will again begin to trickle in