City’s fifth Rotary Club formalized

      Columbia Sunrise Southwest Rotary Club, which has been gathering informally for six months, will be formally recognized on Charter Night, April 24.
      The Southwest Rotary has 37 charter members and meets at 7 a.m. on Thursdays at Country Club of Missouri. Dr. Neil Riley, a dentist, is the president and Mike Kelly of The Insurance Group is the president-elect.
      The founders of Columbia’s fifth Rotary Club say they formed the service and networking organization because the existing clubs have just about reached their membership capacities.
      “It’s just supply and demand,” said Daniel Scotten, a charter member and former member of Columbia Rotary South, which also meets at Country Club of Missouri. The Friday morning Rotary meetings at CCMO had become so crowded that people sometimes have a hard time hearing the speaker, he said.
       Only five of the charter members came from other Rotary clubs in Columbia, and the others are new to the organization, according to Riley, who belonged to the Northwest Rotary for 31 years.
       “It’s not a case in which we’ve raided clubs,” Scotten, a senior vice president at Boone County National Bank, said. “Being part of something new is an attraction to some people,” Scotten said,
      The organization decided it needed a few veteran Rotary members for guidance, Riley said. Some joined the relatively small new Rotary so they can become more familiar with fellow members, he added.
       While Columbia’s Rotary membership has been growing, the southwest Missouri Rotary district’s membership has had about 3,000 members for a long time, Tim Donovan, the assistant district governor, said. A few small towns have disbanded their Rotary chapters, he said.
       The other four Rotary Clubs in the city are: Rotary Club of Columbia, better known as the Downtown Rotary, which formed in 1922, meets at noon on Thursdays in Dulany Hall of Columbia College and has about 160 members; Rotary Club of Columbia-Northwest, which formed in 1970, meets at noon on Thursdays at the Peachtree Banquet Center and has about 150 members; Columbia Rotary-South, which formed in 1986, meets at the Country Club of Missouri at 6:45 a.m. on Fridays and has about 110 members; Columbia Metro Rotary Club, which formed in 1993,  meets at noon on Wednesdays at Columbia Country Club and has about 90 members.