California District Proposal

[cbale2000]

To add to a few points...

Originally Posted by Mr V

This is what FIRST is talking about when they say that Districts are cheaper than Regionals. So putting on say 10 district events and a DCMP can cost about the same as putting on 2 Regionals. Note this does vary greatly because venue costs vary greatly as well.

This is one of the key things FiM has sought to address with districts in Michigan, by moving to High School venues, most if not all of the venue rental costs are eliminated (as many school do not charge for the use of the facilities), typically leaving only maintenance and staffing costs for custodial and security services. While these costs do also vary by venue, they are still, for the most part, orders of magnitude lower than the costs for a traditional regional venue.

Originally Posted by Mr V

Switching to the District System alleviates those stepped on toes since the fund raising is for the entire district instead of for what may be one of multiple Regionals which may have different RDs in a general geographic area. Note you will find that some districts events the host team may find a local sponsor to provide food, coffee, or bottled water for the volunteers.

Also not entirely true, FiM encourages districts to find local sponsorship for their events and will simply fill in any gaps in funding on an as-needed basis. Most events are geographically far enough away that they avoids overlap in requests for sponsorship, and because the costs are less, it makes more sense to seek out smaller sponsorships from smaller local businesses. Also by placing some of the burden of finding sponsors on the events, it causes district event planing committees to be more frugal with their money, further reducing costs (after all, what incentive do you have to cut costs if you know you're getting a blank check).

Originally Posted by Mr V

With the district system the "normal sized" District typically owns two fields and it is common for 2 events to happen the same weekend. Smaller districts like IN will only have one field and one event per weekend while FiM has 3 or more events per weekend and the corresponding number of fields.

In the case of Michigan, I believe FiM actually owns 1 or 2 fields and rents/borrows the rest from FIRST. This year we had 4 fields in use across the state, and going forwards FiM is already looking at the possibility of getting a 5th field to run 5 events on one weekend (from what I've heard anyways). That said, FiM handles all of the transportation from all of the fields, rather than paying for them to hauled around via Tractor Trailers every week.