Well, the New Year is here along with a new Bridge, a new Staff, new titles for Elected Officers and new options for Staff Officers at the Division level. Hopefully, all of you have a new optimism and enthusiasm for our Auxiliary going forward in 2009. I can assure you your Bridge does!!

Looking back is sometimes a disappointing view, but not this year. We grew our membership by about 570 new members, and even with a loss of 143 due to year end disenrollment's, we ended up with a net gain of just over 8 %. We are well on the way back from a scant few years ago. Job well done!!!!

What is really exciting about looking back this year is the very obvious growth in our mission sets, in our relationships with the Active duty and our performance to the commitments we made. I believe that is the result of our paying attention to COMO Brown’s watch-words of “Integration, Innovation and Integrity”. I believe doing that is so vitally important that we are keeping them and making them our “District Watch Words” for the next two years.

D-7 was an early implementer of the “Auxiliary Sector Coordinator” (ASC) position and function. The knowledge we gained in the last two years not only served us well, but also the National Program. Every Sector in D-7 now has a dedicated ASC who serves on the Sector Commander’s staff as a consultant on the use, deployment, and capabilities of the Auxiliary in a mission execution or support role. Every Sector Commander has welcomed and embraced our ASCs as a value added member of their staff.

The efforts we have made this past year in jointly defining and planning new mission capabilities for us has had overwhelming success with the Gold Side. What has allowed that to happen is we have, and are, delivering on our commitments! We are doing what we said we would do to provide that support. An annual planning document called the “Commander’s Performance Assessment” (CPA) that just went forward 1 DEC from the Sectors and the District to Head Quarters included Auxiliary support activity for each Sector and Air Station. That is a first time event for any Auxiliary District and one that is being observed by every other District, Gold and Silver.

Our challenge this coming year is to keep the momentum going, to keep moving forward, to pay attention, to not take our eyes off the role we must also play in Recreational Boating Safety (RBS). The economic situation in 2008 made it more difficult to expand our RBS efforts, but as we always do, we need to find new ways to complete those missions and prevent unnecessary loss of life. I know we can do it.

I could not be more proud or more excited to be your DCO in these exciting and challenging days for D-7. You must know that all of the accolades, support and encouragement we are receiving from the Gold Side are the absolute, direct result of your efforts!!! You should feel very good about that.

Semper Paratus! Always ready!