TWO SPECIAL IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS TO MEMBERS:

1) As previously announced in the Newsletter, your Board determined that, for budgetary reasons, the ATA must recoup fees charged by PayPal and credit cards for those very handy electronic payments we all enjoy using. We have recently learned that there may be a problem in simply adding on the 3.5% as intended, so we will NOT be doing this for now, at least until March, to allow time to figure out the best method of solving the complexities such a surcharge creates. Any such fees paid thus far will be promptly refunded.


SPECIAL REQUEST FOR MEMBER-VOLUNTEER ASSISTANCE: If you are experienced and knowledgeable about pricing to recover such fees, would you PLEASE volunteer to advise us? Contact: ATA President Tim Holekamp at Holekamp@aol.com.
Your help would be most appreciated.

2) One change caused by the ATA's decision to hold our Annual Meeting in early October (to take advantage of the much better weather) is that we were not able to announce and present Horse of the Year and other awards at the Meeting. Although this impact was expected, we know it was a disappointment for the winners and attendees. On the other hand, there is a silver lining! Now we can perfectly align our awards competition for each sport with the actual competition year each discipline has established. There will need to be some transition to the new award cycle, in that those competitions after October 1, 2013 and before the disciplines' year-ends last year will not be counted for ATA HOY awards in 2014. Please bear with us while we make this alignment between our award year and that of the individual disciplines. In the long run, we think this will be a very good thing and make everyone's life easier.

Competitors Please Take Note: Starting this year, the ATA Awards competition year for Eventing, Hunters, and Jumpers will begin December 1, 2013, and end November 30, 2014.
Dressage will be unchanged, ending on September 30. Any other disciplines in award consideration will follow their governing bodies' designated competition years.