Fall Creek Watershed Committee Minutes
December 5th, 2002
DeWitt Middle School

Present: George Patte, Yvette de Boer, Joyce Gerbasi, Roxy Johnston, Sherry Forgash, Will Burnell, Stephen Penningroth, Ross Gerbasi

Note taker(s): Roxy and Phil

During the previous meeting a question was asked about a pipe that drains into Fall Creek near the Cayuga St. Bridge. Roxy and Phil found similar information that indicates it is a groundwater drainage system and does run some distance towards the leaking gas storage tank. We are not certain how close it gets to that site.

It was noted that Phil took terrific notes at the November FCWC meeting…. Thanks Phil!

George will continue to monitor flows with the hopes of getting a January high water sample.

We introduced ourselves for the benefit of the guests in the room.

Additions to the agenda: Report from FCWC to CLWN board in near future (possibly February?). Joyce voiced concern that funding could be cut if the FCWC doesn't report on their efforts.

New Business: George brought along the data report from Bolton Point water study. If time allowed, it would be interesting to compare it to our new Fall Creek data.

Announcements: Yvette is 5 months pregnant! We will need to find a new chair by February. She is due in April.

Presentations: Will presented the data storage format that Cortland County uses for their water quality monitoring. They use Microsoft Excel, it is easily transferred to GIS (ArcView) and makes nice reports and graphs. Only drawback of Excel is that it may 'max' out on data storage. Other programs with more data storage abilities are not as user friendly or as easily imported to GIS, etc. Will or Pat can take time to show folks how to use this program. It was suggested that the FCWC designate 1-3 folks to enter data and send the data to Will or Pat to merge w/ their dataset. Data entry could be done here or at the Cortland SWCD. Stephen indicated he was interested in learning about it. Roxy volunteered to help w/ Excel questions. Sherry was also interested and will talk to Gordy about getting trained. Stephen was going to see if Mark would also be interested in data entry for the FCWC. Stephen will coordinate with Cortland SWCD about training.

Sherry passed out her proposal for education kits. She has been working with local teachers and other SWCD's to develop the idea and received funding from the EPA to purchase kits. The City's Water Treatment Plant is also going to collaborate. She has soil kits, water quality kits, and BMI kits. The intended use group is high school students. This year she will roll the program out with a training session for interested teachers. In future years, she may coordinate with CSI for some of the training sessions - she will discuss this with Steve P. Phil suggested matching her BMI sites to the DEC sites for comparing data. Joyce suggested contacting some monitoring groups from Pennsylvania. Sherry also explained about the Envirothon that SW sponsors each year.
The summary of Nov. 19's samples showed lower bacteria numbers, higher reactive phosphorus, and higher nitrates. Steve was happy to see similar patterns in the data. He will prepare bottles in advance so the group can more easily respond to high water events. Yvette or Phil will keep the bottles.

Phil finished ID'ing the last set of BMI samples. Steve will send the results and samples to Anne for review.

Submitted by Roxy Johnston