Getting Ready Already

By Dale Dauten, syndicated columnist

As long as you don’t look at the outdoor temperature, it’s starting to feel like Fall here in the desert. The school buses are rumbling around town, the Halloween merchandise is appearing in stores (and you know they’ll start playing Christmas music any time now), and the folks at The Resort are busy planning for the best season ever.

We caught up with George Igualt, head of the management company, to ask what to expect. “For one thing,” he told us, “the place is going to look better than ever. We decided that the level of landscape maintenance just wasn’t good enough. So we ended our contract with the company we’d had, moved it in-house and upped our standards. We have a new team that can devote more hours a week to the landscape and the parks are going to look top-notch.”

Tim Furlong, Maintenance Manager, praised the new landscape professionals that he’s added and sent us the photos below, saying, “You’ll be seeing a lot of these two around the park. That’s Isaac Moran in the white shirt and Alfredo Coon in the black.”

In addition to improvements in landscaping, George is looking forward to the resurfacing of the park’s streets. This is scheduled for later in September or into October because, as George informed us, “You have to wait for the right combination of warm days and cool nights so that the material fills in just right.”

THE FIRST ACTIVITY TO REPORT IN

Then, there are all the activities planned for the season. We’ll have lots more info in future editions, but we do have one organization that has its plan ready to go.

Our thanks to Bingo.org for the photo and while you won’t want to mount up just yet, Opening Night is less than 10 weeks away, coming November 7^th. The games will then continue through March, every Thursday evening, except Thanksgiving.

Bingo takes a lot of planning, and more than a little paperwork as the State of Arizona has a Bingo Unit requiring quarterly reports (and taking 1.5% off the top). We had a chance to visit with Jeff Christensen, starting his second year as Manager of The Resort Bingo.

Jeff started with a review of last season’s results, telling us, “We had a very successful year. We paid out in prizes over forty thousand dollars, and we have about two thousand dollars waiting to be be dispersed to clubs here at The Resort.” (Jeff added, “The distribution of funds to clubs will require filling out a funds request in the Activities Office. The requests will be reviewed for approval and payment of funds coordinated through the Activities Office.)

As for the upcoming season, he put together a flier announcing the new season. We asked Jeff about those new games mentioned in the flier.

“We have four new games coming. There’s one I think people are really going to welcome – it’s for Game 14 and the old Goal Post is being replaced with the Layer Cake game. And we’re going to be raising the jackpots – right from Opening Night we’ll have the Moneyball Jackpot starting at $1,000, and we’ll have two progressive jackpots each night. We’ve raised the base payout by $250 a night, and we added an additional prize for the warm-up game. And we did that without raising prices – the price of cards has not increased.”

Our thanks to Jeff for all his work. As we get closer to the new season, look for bingo news and updates on the bulletin board outside the ballroom.

Finally, we recently came across some aerial photos taken a few years back and we decided to include a couple we think are sure to make you look forward to coming back.