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HomeMy WebLinkAbout2022-02-02 2/22/22 CONSERVATION BOARD 2/22/2022 Hybrid Members Present: Gian Dodici (Chair), Bob Beck, Anne Clark, Craig Schutt, Andrew Miller, Nancy Munkenbeck, Tim Woods, Steve Bissen Absent: J Grace Liaisons: Loren Sparling (Town Board) Guest(s): The meeting was called to order at 7:00 PM. Review and approval of minutes dated January 25th, 2022 On motion made by C Schutt, seconded by T Woods, minutes were unanimously approved as amended. Planning Board The Planning Board is going to be releasing the comp plan draft to the public. They did not take a lot of guidance on map recommendations, but input can still be provided until the Town Board votes on it. EMC T Woods gave his presentation on the Netflix video “Kiss the Ground”. Rail Trail Task Force Last Thursday the Town Board did a SEQR required by the TAP grant for the bridge and the trail. R Burger sent that on to Erdmann Anthony and got the final design report back from the engineers. It will be sent into DOT. That’s another step forward for the Route 13 bridge. Still waiting for game farm road plan for the trail crossing by Barton and Loguidice and then they will look forward to a response from Tompkins County highway. Hopefully soon they can get that road crossing in quickly. Parking on the roadway is very unsafe but the county does not want any parking on Game Farm Road. There are no parking signs, but people seem to ignore those. There is parking off of Stevenson Road although it hasn’t been approved by Cornell ag. The long term solution is to have an off road parking off of Stevenson Road for a drive in parking lot. There’s a wet spot and the solution is to have the highway dept ditch it. G Dodici thinks draining a wetland is not a good solution and adding a board walk would be a better idea. B Beck doesn’t think 2/22/22 it’s a wetland, just accumulated water on and next to the rail bed. This would not be a major ditching project. Town Board L Sparling sent around the 284 agreement agreed to by the Town Board and highway superintendent that lists the dpw projects projected for 2022. B Beck, A Miller, T Woods & Anne Clark were reappointed to the Conservation Board and S Bissen was appointed to the Conservation Board as a new member. A resolution was passed declaring Dryden’s intent to join the Owasco lake management council a not for profit local development corporation whose mission is to manage, monitor, and protect the water resources of Owasco lake and its watershed and to obtain grant funding for the implementation of watershed protection projects. R Burger was appointed to be the towns representative on the councils board of directors. A Clark has been selected as our representative. There are vacancies on some of Dryden’s advisory boards so L Sparling is asking them to spread the word if they know of anyone who would be interested. Cassie has been having trouble getting entries for the towns newsletter every month. L Sparling is encouraging the board to send in a small blurb every month. Kiss the Ground Resolution T Woods presented a resolution (attached) for support for employing bio-sequestration & regenerative agricultural practices in the town. Several members of the board did not feel as though the resolution was worded in a way they would vote towards. Comments: • Why would we need to support this if the town already allows it? There’s nothing that says farmers cannot use this process. • I will not vote for this because I like less government. • T Woods is just trying to get the information out there that bio-sequestration is possible and farming is the best way to do it. • There’s a lot more work that has to be done on this. • A resolution that we can all stand easily behind should be careful about raising the eyer of people. We have positives that we want but no reason to write all of conventional farmer in the negative. As we move forward with whatever were going to do we should promote what we want to promote without castigating everyone else. • The resolution doesn’t acknowledge the good things, only the bad things. • I don’t see how a resolution like this would cause a town law to be put in place. • This doesn’t need unanimous support for this resolution to be passed. • Changing to a need system would be costly and slow. • I think passing this resolution would open a can of worms. • I don think the conservation board needs to be addressing ag practices that are already heavily regulated at state and federal levels. 2/22/22 • Make it clear that this is not something new, it is tied to other important efforts and this group and the town board should be supportive of these efforts. • The members of the board should be more familiar with the practices. Maybe someone should come in for educational purposes. Stormwater-Ground disturbance C Schutt brought up stormwater regulations. He commented that a ground disturbance permit is completed when any amount of soil is disturbed no matter the size of disturbance. The ground disturbance form is hard to understand and isn’t very user friendly. G Dodici agrees that there’s a problem in the town with stormwater regulation and/or oversite. But instead of trying to find where the problems are in the application problem, it might be better to invite Ray Burger or Dave Sprout to come talk to the board about these issues and find a way to resolve them. There being no further business the meeting was adjourned at 8:30 PM. Respectfully submitted, Emily Banwell