OK how about this as an out of the box idea - not sure if it will work, haven't tried it, but you could have the current date skinobject in there but use the yyyy format only -and in the site, omit the date in the site settings.You know you can set the date to display in different formats - so why not omit everything but just have the year...
If you use the date on other parts of the skin you would need to be sure you create a second instance of it since you cannot run duplicates of the same skinobject in the page or it comes up with an error.
I know it might be a work around, but it doesn't require any vb coding and the tools are already there.
Just thought -
Nina Meiers