ECC Minutes – Apr. 2015

Town of Rochester Environmental Conservation Commission

Meeting Minutes March 12, 2015

 

Facilitator: Laura

Attendance: Chris, Laura, Angela, Stu, Barbara, Tim, Ben, Colin, Hank. Guests: Melissa, Larry, Greg

Recorder: Chris

 

I.      Call to Order: 6pm

II.    Business and Logistics

A.    Minutes review and approval from February meeting.

III.   Reports

A.    Larry and Laura met with the principal of Rondout High School, Bob Cook. Was enthusiastic about working together and bringing in high school students to the ECC. Would they be involved in the Rondout Water Quality Research Project? He was excited about this possibility. It would be nice to start working with sophomores so they can work with us for a long time.

B.    EMC Report – Tim

Pilgrim Pipeline was shot down. Additional clean up money from GE to clean marshes with pollutants in it. 7,000 tons per month of garbage being hauled out of town that we pay for. Barbara expressed concern about so much good garbage being hauled; Tim said that there’s more composting happening at county facility. The new vans for the county were vetoed. The meeting was adjourned early. Tim passed out information from Riverkeeper. They help with an “ambassadorship” that allows us to table with their info.

C.   Rail Trail Report-Stu

The new info is that the committee is trying to do an over-the-road trail on Lucas because of some issues of land ownership and not wanting to cross Route 209. There’s also going to be a new bridge over Rochester Creek, but because the funding hasn’t fully come in it’s unclear where the trail will be at that spot. The county just sent out a press release about new funding for Lucas Turnpike where the man died last year, and at the entrance to Acorn School. Chris will send Stu the press release about the funding because it may be good for the Trail Committee to get involved now while still in the design phase.

D.   Grant Reports-Chris/Larry/Laura

The Open Space Inventory grant is slowly moving forward. Larry just sent in another form that was required. Chris, Larry, Ben, and Laura are meeting Laura Heady from the DEC Estuary Program next week. Once we hear more we can start to plan when our in-kind time will be needed. We would like to include RVGA in the process, and any other group that would like to be involved.

E.    UCRRA- Angela and Barbara

F.    Rondout Creek Watershed Alliance-John and Colin

No new news. John will be back in town soon.

 

IV.  New Business-

A.    Event Planning: Earthday and Earthday event

There’s a clean up on April 18 and an event on April 25. Clean up meet up is at 9am at Skate Time 209. Maybe we can borrow safety cones from Skate Time, or Stu may be able to borrow some from Steve Rice. Chris spoke to Carol Dennin of the youth department about the ingredients for pizza. She will purchase them once Chris gives her a list of what we need. Tim will bring plenty of toppings. Barbara will seek additional food donations again. Tim and Barbara will work together to hang signage. We will get additional 11×17 flyers printed up to hang around town. We will also need signage for the clean up day. Chris will look into getting vinyl lettering to paste new dates on top of old dates on the signs that we have. We need two sets of signs and two sets of flyers, for the two separate events. Tim and Chris will bring wood for the pizza oven.

·         Who is on the panel, or who is speaking? The bee supply guy can’t make it, although he was a great speaker. The butterfly woman has something important to do that day, but we don’t think we’re going with her. We’d like a half hour of speaking and then Q&A. We are thinking about inviting Francis Groeters from Catskill Native Nursery. The nursery is well known, which can draw people in, and CNN is having a Wildflower Festival in early May which he may want to promote. Chris Hewitt will invite him. Another option is Chris Harp from Honeybeelives.org. He brings a demonstration hive. Chris Hewitt will invite him to speak. Saunderskill has their Draft Horse event on the same day, so we may want to go over there with some flyers so people can come to our event afterward. Chris will also send out an email to the Accord Community Pizza group. We can ask both Francis and Chris to speak for 15 minutes and then have them set up tables to answer additional questions after the Q&A. The theme is still bees, butterflies and backyard pollinators.

·         Recycling for earthday cleanup

·         Gmo’s: Barbara will address this at the event and will also have information about county garbage and composting.

·         Signage/Flyers/Advertising: Melissa designed a business card that we can all pass out during the event. There’s a nice QR Code on the back that brings people to the ECC Facebook. The ECC FB name is very long right now, so Angela will try to adjust the name to be shorter.

·         Other items: Water Quality table, seed bombs, free trees or plants (Stu will look into ordering bunches of blueberry bushes from CCE in advance of their April sale), a resource list, volunteer table (we can give people who sign up the first free stuff), and additional info. Stu will also see if he can get the Seed Library to sell red clover at cost for us to give away. Chris will be selling biodegradable and reusable cups, sporks, plates and bowls at the best price that Angela finds online. We think we’ll need 100 of each.

B.    Laura mentioned an idea to plant a pollinator garden near town hall in honor of Cindy Stokes, the decease town assessor. Laura is going to talk to Brian Drabkin to move this idea forward, and to see if he’ll plant the garden. Barbara is willing to work with him on it.

C.   Riverkeeper advanced planning

We can start at Scenic Road where fire department gets water from the Creek. Discussed a clean up where Stony Kill meets the Rondout, on David Lawrence’s property. Maybe also the Rochester Creek. We have to publish the locations to Riverkeeper. We want easy launch and egress points. And it may be possible to have a third team if we have enough people. The Riverkeeper Sweep is May 9.

D.   Omega visit

We’re going to wait on this for now.

E.    Green Certification – Planning next steps

No new progress

F. Hank shared a map of mastodon bone sites around Orange County and discussed their relationship to the moving glaciers.

 

I.      Old Business

A.    Any old business?

II.    Action Item Review

III.   Adjourn: 7:15pm