Your dues payment is due by the end of this month to keep your membership in good standing. Renewal invoices were mailed in late November. Contact me if you need another copy of your bill. You can pay with a credit card; just go to the Online Payment page of www.saboma.org (or just click 'Credit Card Payment' from the Quick Links at left) and select the correct membership category. Prepaid lunches are also available as an additional purchase option; just add both dues and prepaid luncheons to your cart before processing the transaction.

Need to verify that your dues check has been received? Call or email me and I'll let you know. lynn@saboma.org

As a clarification to information in the previous News Flash regarding state registration of electrical maintenance staff, this can be done only if your personnel are Maintenance Electricians, which is a type of licensed electrician. If they do not have an electrician's license, you need to go through the City of SA's registration process. Pay close attention to when your registrations expire... there is no more 30-day grace period and if inspectors catch someone with an expired registration changing a light bulb they will be fined.

Regardless of whether you go through the city or state to register your maintenance staff, all buildings must also hold a permit for maintenance electrical work in addition to certifying individual employees who work on the premises. This means that if you have multiple buildings on a single property, they must each hold a permit. Along with the permit, an "Electrical Work Log" for each building must be on site and available for inspection. Mimi Camargo can answer any questions you may have: 210-207-8074.

Last call to register for our next RPA course, Design, Operation and Maintenance of Building Systems, Part One! The following students are confirmed for registration; if you wish to be added to the class roster please contact me no later than this Friday.

• Altwein, Alex
• Bias, David
• Bostdorf, Carlyne
• Cash, Wendy
• Davis, Betty
• Estrada, Julie
• Gladstone, Amanda
• Gray, Randy
• Martin, Daisy
• Mikolajczyk, Charles
• Petree, Debbie
• Rensmeyer, Cade
• Rodriguez, Clara
• Schwarz, Kim
• Thrall, Jacque
• Wilson, Kristine

Find out more about BOMI courses....

One of our members has a brief survey he needs to conduct for a college class. If you would be willing to answer a few questions to help him out, please contact Victor Lacayo at victor_championcs@hotmail.com. It will take less than five minutes to complete, and he will send you a Starbucks or Krispy Kreme gift certificate in appreciation for your effort.

Most landlords and tenants have been complying with the NEC 2002 requirement that abandoned cable be removed from the plenum spaces of their buildings. This is a good thing for a number of reasons. Most importantly the removal results in a decrease in the amount of fuel for fires and a decrease in the amount of noxious gas released during a fire.

Unfortunately the removal sometimes stops at the door of the suite. If your contractors are only removing the cabling from the suite itself, they are leaving a significant amount of cable in your building and keeping you from being compliant with city code. In addition to code compliance, they are also leaving you with a mess that will continue to grow over the years. The cable should be removed back to the riser room. All telecom equipment, including switch equipment, power supplies and 66 blocks should be removed. In other words, there should be no trace of the tenant once they leave the space. A word of caution; once you reach the riser room or telecom closet, the risk of interfering with other tenants’ service rises. Make sure that your contractor is qualified to work in this area.

Adobe has released version 8 of the free Adobe Reader which no longer allows appended JavaScript within site URLs, a potential security risk. However, many users continue to use older versions of the Adobe Reader plug-in and should update their machine as soon as possible. If you prefer to stay with version 7, you should update to 7.0.9 to protect against the problem.

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