Meetings and Minutes

Minutes of the 12-Sept-08 UEC meeting

Attending UEC reps:

Karen Gibson
Kevin Pitts
Ron Moore
Heather Ray
Matthew Jones
Mike Hildreth
Ashutosh Kotwal
Lee Sawyer
Kirsten Tollefson
Jon Urheim
Tricia Vahle (by phone)

Welcome to new members, thanks to outgoing members

- New UEC members: Mike Hildreth, Karen Gibson, Ron Moore, Heather Ray, Jon Urheim, Tricia Vahle.
- Continuing members: Dan Hooper, Matthew Jones, Ashutosh Kotwal, Kevin Pitts, Lee Sawyer, Mitch Soderberg, Kirsten Tollefson
- Outgoing members have completed their terms with the thanks of the Fermilab User community and UEC: Ela Barberis, Sacha Kopp, Greg Landsberg, Chris Polly, Jean Slaughter, Peter Wittich
- Mitch Soderberg has agreed to be UEC secretary for the coming year, as well as continue his role as webmaster.

Meeting with Young-Kee Kim, Fermilab Deputy Director

• Sept 26 this an internal review for mu to e, followed by a 2-day collaboration meeting
• PAC meets on Nov 3-5. If they recommend Stage I approval. The lab. will give Stage I approval and move to CD0 preparation.

• requests for MOU's sent to national labs and universities
• Collaboration meeting Nov 21,22
• rough cost estimate currently at $750M (accelerator only)
• implementation would of course be stretched out with flat budget scenarios

• Not the same scale of involvement USCMS with CMS - involvment be something like contributing to one subsystem (a size of a university group), in collaboration with regional universities/labs.
• Phased approach: first ~2 years, sign through ANL and U.Chicago, then apply for formal entry at the level of 10 FTE physicists when Tevatron shuts down
• It solves lack of coupling to a large sector of the community (US ATLAS), decrease of connections to U.Chicago and ANL when Tevatron finishes, and recruiting issuew(attracting talent from both CMS and ATLAS experiments)
• Improves mid-west support for ATLAS research
• May attract ATLAS people to help finish Tevatron analyses
• Improve involvement of Fermilab theorists in ATLAS
• Pier discussed this with US CMS at CERN
• Lunch meetings with Fermilab scientists are planned to explain this

• Pier has the report, it will be put on a web page
• Lab general policies including the diversity policy will be made more visible from the FNAL web site.

Discussion of the Fermilab Pool

- Kirsten Tollefson will give a full report at the next UEC meeting.

Discussion of UEC activities and goals

Election of new chair:
- Ashutosh Kotwal is the new UEC chair.

Report from Carole McGuire, Lewis-Burke

The fiscal year ends on September 30th. Congress has not passed any appropriation bills for FY09, not even Defense or Homeland Security. So over the next few weeks we expect to see a continuing budget resolution (CR). The details of this CR are unclear, with the following possibilities: -a CR with funding held at the FY08 level -a CR with funding at the FY08 level plus the amount allocated in the supplemental appropriation that was passed in late June which included $62.5M for the DOE Office of Science.

Since the supplemental appropriation passed in late June was an ¡Èemergency supplemental,¡É it does not automatically become part of the FY08 allocation. Under the scenario where the amount of the supplemental is included in the CR, unless there is specific language stating how that money is to be spent, it will be up to the DOE to determine how the funds are allocated.

The length of time that the CR will cover is also unclear. It could be for approximately two months, which would mean that Congress would likely pass another CR sometime in November after the election. The CR could instead have a duration of several months, leaving the FY09 budget to be addressed by the new Congress and new administration in February or later.

Senator Byrd has introduced a $24B second supplemental appropriation bill in the senate which is largely targeted at infrastructure and economic stimulus, but does include money for science, including $150M for DOE Office of Science. That bill has not yet been scheduled for mark up. A $50B supplemental bill is expected to be introduced in the House next week. Given that time is short prior to recess, it is unclear that these supplemental bills have a serious change to progress through Congress. Both Houses will be out for all of October prior to the election.

Carole will report again at our October meeting and tell us the details of the late September budget negotiations!

Upcoming meetings: Oct. 10, Nov. 7, Dec. 5.