Fall Creek Watershed Committee Minutes
April 4, 2002
At community fly fisher office
Present: Joyce Gerbasi, Phil Koons, Sharon Anderson, Roxy Johnston,
Molly Adams, Dave Bouldin, George Patte, Mary Hegarty
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- Stream Clean-up - May 4th 9am-11am
Discussion about the various logistics for the day ensued. Phil and
Sharon updated us and filled us in. Team leaders are all set. Roots
and shoots, plantations, and green club at Cornell were contacted. Joyce
volunteered to contact the Ithaca Journal and Cortland standard for
media coverage. Sharon volunteered to contact Casey Stevens to get him
to interview Sharon. Phil volunteered to call the TV station (Tom Dumus-
may be a contact there).
Fall creek ctte. is on the water week press release saying that we will
be there with some samples of our garbage as well as the stats on pounds
of garbage and list of types of garbage we picked up.
All seems in good order for the clean-up. Thanks to Sharon and Phil
for their work and Joyce for helping too.
- Tompkins County Water Resource Council (TCWRC) wants someone from
the Fall Creek Meeting to go to their meeting on May 20th from 4-6pm
at the Transit center. The focus is on volunteer water monitoring efforts;
agency and citizens will be there. Mary may be able to attend and just
has to find out for sure if it will work in her schedule.
- Molly Adams was introduced and she is the new contact - representing
us (Fall Creek ctte.) at the TCWRC, she took over Roxy's position and
Roxy has taken on a different position within the TCWRC. Molly is with
the Caroline watershed community group.
- Sharon has a volunteer to update the Fall Creek Committee web site.
We would like to put up the data we have thus far, we can look at last
months minutes which has some of the data reported or get it from Steve.
Dave offered to give Sharon his Fall Creek historic data to put on the
web. Joyce volunteered to get the monitoring data to Sharon. Joyce also
suggested posting on the web- info. about our stream clean-up.
- Discussion about the fall creek list-serve. Right now, our listserve
is maintained by Coop Extension, and we need to get off their listserve.
After discussion over having a free yahoo list serve (or one like yahoo),
we decided that we would be willing to donate $100 to the Network and
they would maintain the listserve for us. We will find out if that donation
is acceptable to the Network, and if so, we will be put on that listserve.
- Roxy updated us on -Water week - May 10th and 11th , Friday and Saturday
both days are from 9am - 2pm. Friday is on the Commons and Saturday
is at the Farmers Market. We need volunteers for both days. We will
be displaying some of our "choice" garbage that we got from
the clean up and statistics on how much garbage we collected. We will
also have a flyer like the one we did last year with our contact info.
and our mission statement and what we have done in the past, we will
also have our maps, recruit volunteers for our monitoring program, and
talk to people to bring awareness of the watershed concept, and also
inform in general about our organization, should be fun. Mary and Joyce
may be able to commit to one of the days. Mary may be able to do Saturday
at market. However, we need more volunteers, any takers??? Please e-mail
Mary at mhegarty@dreamscape.com if you want to volunteer for this. Joyce
will also gather the monitoring data that we have collected so far and
have that available for our tabling for these 2 days. Also, there will
be tours given of the water and wastewater treatment plants all during
water week; call the particular plant to set up a time for a tour.
- Roxy reported that the FCWC could use their backpack GPS unit (with
water treatment plant person attached), to get the exact location of
each monitoring sampling site. Roxy, Jose or Gordy can come with us
the next time we monitor and record those data points for us.
- We discussed monitoring in April; we picked the date of April 20th
for our next day to get out in the field. We will find out if that date
works for Steve and Yvette. We discussed monitoring eventually below
and above Beebe Lake, we would all like to monitor there eventually.
Especially to see if there is any nitrate difference.
- Report on BMI training from George and Phil. It was a great success.
They had three nights of training. The first nite they identified to
the level of Order. The second night they identified to level of Family.
The third night they went into the streams and did kick sampling. Overall,
they concluded that the water was of good quality, and limited impact.
We discussed that in some ways BMI monitoring is better for volunteers
than the chemical monitoring because we don't have to mess around with
chemicals and qualitative analysis (color differences). We also discussed
that some of us at the meeting and other volunteers may prefer to kick
around in the stream and see the living organisms rather than the chemical
analysis, while some may prefer the chemical to the BMI. We discussed
the possibility of someday having some volunteers who just collect critters
and other volunteers who do the bug identification. We also discussed
our monitoring program. We need to talk with Yvette and Steve to find
out if we will eventually be doing both BMI and chemical on the same
monitoring day, or if they have other ideas for how we will operate
our monthly and storm event monitoring plans.
Submitted by: Mary Hegarty
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