LAKE COUNTY — ”Tis the season to put thoughts of amazement and admiration to paper. It”s time to nominate the stars of Lake County for the 11th consecutive year.
The annual Stars of Lake County awards ceremony is coming to Konocti Harbor Resort & Spa Sunday, March 30. The gala honors Lake County”s most special individuals, businesses and organizations nominated by community members. A selection committee of between 11 and 13 people business owners and educators from the county”s numerous communities goes through an approximately two-week process of picking the best and the brightest.
“Each member of the community takes hopefully no less than a week to review all the nominations,” Lakeport Regional Chamber of Commerce executive director Melissa Fulton said. Copies of all nominations received by the deadline go to each committee member for perusal. “Then they come together and have a meeting at Konocti Harbor Resort & Spa. They start at 9 a.m. and go till they”re done, and that can be as late as two or three in the afternoon.”
There are no nominations for the 2008 awards ceremony so far, Fulton said. “People wait till January. Some years we get nominations earlier but generally we get them starting in January.”
The final decision of who will get a star in each of 17 categories is made in a secret ballot vote. Five of those categories have two components, Fulton said. “For instance, the environmental award is only a couple of years old, and several years ago we added new business of the year,” Fulton said.
There were 117 entities nominated last year, a record high, according to Fulton. “It was the largest number of nominees we”ve had in 10 years of event,” Fulton said. “We have averaged just under 100 nominations every year. The selection committee has to read through every single nomination. When we say there were 117 nominations, that means there were 117 different entities, but there may be multiple nominations for each. Therefore it”s a rather overwhelming task.”
Fulton said the past two years have seen more nominations than usual, with 106 being the highest number before 2006. “It”s (the 2007 nominations) only five or six more than the year prior, but a good many came in in the last five to six working days of the deadline,” Fulton said. “I think people all of a sudden realize they know someone or a company who should be nominated.”
The deadline to turn in a nomination form to the Lakeport Regional Chamber of Commerce is Feb. 22. For more information or to get a nomination form, call the chamber office at 263-5092, or see page A5 of the Friday edition of the Record-Bee.
Contact Tiffany Revelle at trevelle@record-bee.com. To comment on this story or others, please visit www.record-bee.com.
