Town of Rochester Environmental Conservation Commission
Meeting Minutes November 10, 2016

Facilitator: Laura
Recorder: Chris
Attendance: Laura Finestone, Chris Hewitt, Angela Dorris, Tim Ganon, Rick Jones, and John Messerschmidt
Guest: Larry DeWitt

I. Call to Order: 6:05pm
II. Business and Logistics
A. Minutes approved. No quorum last meeting.
B. New members/term re-ups.
-Chris’s term is up at end of year. He agrees to serve another term.
-We may be able to find more people now since after the election, and people wanting to get involved. Chris will ask Nick DePalma, new resident of T of R.
III. Reports
A. Riverkeeper (Angela)
-There’s a volunteer appreciation party tomorrow night at Boat Building School on the Rondout in Kingston.
-The sampling season is over. 5 out of 6 sites failed, but not terribly. Only the Rochester was very high counts.
-We got a reply from the DEC about our report of Camp Yashiva. They did inspections of 4 other seasonal camps in the area, and all 5 were issued violations. The results of our entero testing made this possible. The violations weren’t major, but they all need to be addressed.
B. Natural Heritage Plan report/ECC (Laura)
-Will review later in the meeting as we go over the prioritization survey.
C. EMC
-Judith attended. Not present today for report.
D. Planning Board Report
-John Michelson and David Church will be at the next Planning Board meeting to start to present the Natural Heritage Plan. They already did a short presentation to Mike Baden, but now the whole board will come into the mix. The end goal of these presentations is to have each board/commission understand the plan before it goes to the town board.
E. Climate Smart Communities
-No report at this time. Angela, Judith and Laura will report about this next month. Being Climate Smart will allow us to qualify for more funding. Judith started conducting an Energy Audit of all the town buildings.
F. Omelet
-No report.
G. Watershed Conference
-Angela gave quick report on the conference. She has flyers and info from the conference if anyone wants to see them. There were resources on nyclimatescience.org. There was funding for training for people who operate discharge sites. A common problem with these sites is that they’re built well but people who work there don’t operate them properly. Our ECC can suggest to the town board that it be required that any operator has to take the training.
-Laura mentioned that there is now Septic Week which will occur again next year, and Jen Metzger would like to work on education for citizens about the importance of cleaning a septic tank.
IV. New Business
A. Natural heritage prioritization survey
-We all reviewed the steps to take to fill out this report. It’s a very straightforward survey, and quick. This has to be done by tomorrow, Friday, 11/11/16. We would like John and David to add access points to Rondout to our list of Resources. We all brainstormed new things that should be in the list of Features and Resources, e.g. Minnewaska and Mohonk Preserve
B. Climate Smart. Next time.
C. Next meeting agenda-plan year, create vision. Next meeting.

I. Old Business
II. Action Item Review
III. Adjourn: 7:15pm