ECC November 2014

Town of Rochester ECC meeting minutes, November 13, 2014

 

Attendance: Barbara Fornal, Stu Dorris, Angela Dorris, Laura Finestone, Chris Hewitt. Guests: Larry DeWitt, Colin McDonough, Melissa Orozco, John Messerschmitt

 

  1. Call to Order; 7:03pm

 

  1. Business and Logistics
  2. Minutes review and approval from October meeting. Approved.

 

III. Reports

  1. Water Quality (Angela)
  • Testing results have improved. The 42nd Street bridge area has a pipe with effluent coming out. It tests at around the same quality of the Rondout.
  1. EMC Report (Tim)
  2. Mohonk Consultations (Stu)
  • Food Security event was not very eventful for Stu.
  1. Rail Trail Report (Stu)
  • There has been nice progress on cleaning up portions of the trail. The missing section between town hall and William’s Lumber is still needing a lot of work. Carl found $4,000 to put toward maintenance. The state does not allow the rail trail to run along a state road, so there will have to either be some road adjustments or will go through Bank brothers, or Davenport, property.
  1. Natural Resources Map (Chris and Laura)
  • Would like to make a plan with the group on next steps. The NRI progress should be rolled into future progress on the Open Space Plan. This process is slightly stalled to see if there is funding available to make progress on OSP.
  1. UC Resource Recovery Agency (Angela and Barbara)
  • Great attendance, and the agency backed off of closing all of the transfer stations and from tenure agreement (that’s switching to a one-year agreement). Not happening for every single town, e.g. Esopus and Lloyd. Dumping rates in Seneca increased, so that cost is being passed down to the towns. Some of the private haulers are only having about 40% of waste sorted properly, so about 60% of customers are not recycling so the recyclables are being burned. Clear bags could help to begin solving the problem. Barbara would like to see the ECC pursue the Earth Day campaign go even further by doing more education all year. Laura suggests that we come up with a new slogan for our education campaign (one idea was Clean Stream). There was a suggestion to buy compost bins in bulk that can be sold to community members. This will also require more education about how to compost.

 

  1. New Business

 

  1. Save the Rondout Action Plan (John)
  • In Woodstock, the town helps with septic fixes. Dan Shapley from Riverkeeper provided John with packets that help with how to start improving septic systems. John and Dan have been in communication. DEC Division of Water helps areas more quickly that have a strong group or passion behind the effort. In addition to private homeowner septics, we should focus on group septics of mini complexes, wastewater treatment plants, and others. This could be a contentious issue because this would be taking on a large expense for the town. One suggestion of an ECC member was to ask homeowners to put $50 per year, for example, into a town septic fund that helps guarantee that contributors never have to worry about paying for a septic fix in the future.
  1. Solarize
  • project being funded by NYSERDA. Will help with more local cost installations of solar. Carl has been in on this conversation.
  1. Niagara Bottling
  • a company is trying to get the rights to pump 2 million gallons a day from Cooper Lake for their water bottling company. They claim that this will create jobs. They will make a lot of money on a resource that we’re all trying to protect.
  1. Pilgrim Pipeline
  • Town of Rosendale passed a resolution last night to not allow it to come through the town. The plan may not go through, but we need to research more about it.
  1. Meeting time
  • the whole group agreed to start meeting at 6pm instead of 7pm.

 

Adjourn: 8:05pm