| All,
I have been in discussion with Michele Bersillon concerning the new fee for foreign registrants to pay the same fee as North American hybridizers and her request to register directly with the AIS since she is an American national and files completely in English.
I have previously told her that she would need to continue to file through an associate registrar and that as to the fees. If the country registrar charges a fee, it is in addition to the fee required by the AIS.
Her most recent response is below and as the world wide registration authority for non-bulbous irises, the AIS Board of Directors needs to be aware of the potential implications of their recent decision.
While some of this may just be pique, there may be some potential problem(s). On the other hand I have not yet heard complaints from any other Associate Registrars except to enquire about details of how people are to pay. I am setting up a PayPal account and trying to work out some of those details.
We could adopt a policy that would allow the Associate Registrars to take some amount of the AIS fee (e.g., $5.00) for their service. Registrants would pay $10 to AIS and whatever fee to the Associate Registrar. Or pay the Associate registrar directly and the Associate pay the AIS (via PayPal)
I am open to other suggestions, lacking any other action by the Board, to continue with the policy as instituted.
Thanks
John Begin forwarded message: Date: August 10, 2011 11:43:04 PM PDT
Subject: Re: Misc
John,
For your information, all associate registrars have always charged a fee for registration (it varies from country to country), so all registrants outside of north America will now be paying over $15 for each registration; I am not the only one involved! However, I would like to say feel that it is very unfair to ask people outside of the United States to now pay the equivalent of somewhere between $19 and nearly $23 for official registration of each plant and, unless the various European iris societies decide to stop demanding a fee for registrations, you may eventually find yourself either with a rebellion on your hands or simply a progressive refusal on the part of Europeans to register their plants with the AIS. This may result in the indiscriminate use of names that may already have been used by previously registered plants or simply those that aren't officially registered, even by plants that are commercialised, with the confusion that you can easily imagine. There are already a whole whack of iris commercialised in France that don't have officially registered names, including an entire page in the Bourdillon catalogue, for example; I don't know why they never registered these plants.
Just for the record and since you ask, I ceased registering my plants with the SFIB for many reasons. First of all, the registrar of this association made many mistakes on one of my first registrations and then, when I sent him corrections, he set about making others and finally I had to correct the problem directly with Keith Keppel, since Jean Peyrard is a most difficult person to deal with directly and does not accept remarks about the mistakes that he continues to make with good grace. Then I had other problems with the association and no longer wished either to be a member or pay them any money for any reason, so I requested to send in registration forms directly and pay the full AIS fee, but was not allowed to do so. The AIS registrar at the time told me that I had to send my forms in French to the SFIB registrar and then post a form in English directly to him, plus paying the SFIB fee, which was not acceptable to me---just to spare someone's feelings. Life is complicated enough already. Simply to be able to continue to officially register plants, I asked Gisela Dathe if I could send in my already filled-out English language forms through GdS and have been paying their fee even though they do not do anything more than post my forms along with theirs. Now that the forms are likely to be electronic ones (a definite progress), there may not be much in the way of actual postal fees, so I have no idea how they will deal with that. I would suggest that, as the new AIS registrar, you contact them about how they are going to do things, as Gisela wasn't aware of how things are going to work now when I asked her earlier this year.
Incidentally, Richard Cayeux told me a few things about his problems with registrations this year, including a refusal of the name "Ciel Gris sur Poilly", which seemed very strange to me since I didn't think the name could possibly have already been used. Apparently there was some issue about the name having four words, but this has been allowed for quite some time now and is even mentioned on the SFIB website, so it is very unclear what happened. Should Richard get in touch with you directly to straighten out this matter?
All the best,
Michele
P.S My first name has only one "l".
__________________ John I Jones Registrar-Recorder American Iris Society
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