Meetings - Red Hook Village Green Committee

Meetings

Tuesday, February 17, 2004 Meeting Minutes

Attendees: David Seymour, Christina Staubi, Evelyn Krueger, Franceska Urbin, Mark Meritt, Dan Streib

Open the Meeting

David Seymour opened the meeting at 7:07 p.m.

Minutes of Last Meeting

The minutes from the January 20, 2003, meeting were accepted with only a minor change required.

Greens Committee (Christina Staubi):

	In preparation for a meeting with Lou Sebesta, our New York State Forester, Brenda Cagle, Karen Cadorette, and Christina Staubi met on Monday, February 2, 2004, to locate and preview over 40 trees that were identified in the tree inventory database as needing a consult.
	On Wednesday, February 11, 2004, Brenda met with Lou to inspect the village trees that require a consult. Lou made his recommendations on the trees that were reviewed. Another meeting is necessary to review the remaining trees. Christina will update the tree inventory database with these recommendations. Brenda will schedule an additional meeting with Lou and also follow up on his recommendations.
	We would like to tag each tree in the village with a unique number to help identify the trees more easily. Chris is working with Karen to estimate the costs of these tags.
	Brenda is working on the Forestry Management Plan and corresponding presentation in preparation for the kick-off meeting.
	Dan Streib, the Village of Red Hook highway foreman, attended the meeting to discuss his process for taking down trees in the village. Throughout the year, he gets requests to remove trees for various reasons. He pulls together a list of trees and submits it to the village trustees. If Dan could feed that list into the Village Green Committee before he goes for approval, we could add our 2-cents, as we will be working with an arborist to determine which trees need to be removed. Dan agreed to give this a try.
	David Seymour needs to find out if the village can opt to cable a tree in an effort to keep from cutting it down. Would the village have any liability in this case?
	Central Hudson was pruning trees on West Market Street this week. Joe Tishner of Central Hudson called to discuss this with David. Joe agreed to attend the March meeting.

Communications Committee (Mark Meritt):

We agreed that, because each contributor to the “Bakeless Bake Sale” was sent a personal thank-you note, there is no longer a need to submit a letter to the editor thanking them.

Mark is working on the update for the next water bill.

Brenda is working on a newspaper article that describes our work with Cornell and the tree inventory database. This article will be completed and published once all the details for the kick-off meeting are ironed out.

A new update was submitted to About Town.

Evelyn will give a list of all our donors to Mark, and he will update the website with this information.

Kick-off Meeting

	We will reserve the Red Hook Inn for the first available Friday evening in April. Social hour will begin at 7pm, and the Forestry Management Plan will be presented at 8pm.
	We agreed that we will request a donation of $10 per person to help cover our costs. This admission fee will be waived for Village Green volunteers.
	Jen Melitski will create the invitations, as well as the coupon for free admission.
	We agreed on the people who will be sent an invitation. In addition, we will publish information about the event in the paper so that the general public can attend as well.

We discussed the costs of maintaining our Village Green website. After many suggestions, we decided that we will no longer update the website with monthly minutes from our meetings. Instead, we will do the following:

	Agendas will no longer be published.
	The “next meeting” information on our home page will be changed to indicate that the Village Green Committee meets the third Tuesday of each month at 7pm in the village hall.
	Minutes will be posted on the website either quarterly or when we have another major update to make (which ever makes more sense).

In addition, we still need to follow up with Richard about getting the password so that we can make updates ourselves.

Fundraising Committee (Evelyn Krueger):

Financial status:

	To date, we have received $952.00 from the “Bakeless Bake Sale”.
	Our Village Green fund totals $5536.90.
	Our village budget fund totals $1873.16.

Thank-you notes have been sent to everyone who donated money during our “Bakeless Bake Sale”.

Evelyn completed the application for the Greenway Grant and sent it in.

Additional Business

Franceska Urbin completed the letter to Gov. Pataki. The Village Green officers will sign it and mail it.

Motion to Close Meeting

Christina made a motion to close the meeting at 8:35 p.m. Mark seconded the motion.