2004-09-16-TREE-min - Laserfiche WebLink

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Lexington Town Tree Committee Lexington, Massachusetts, September 16, 2004 (Extraordinary meeting) Minutes of the Meeting Meeting opened at 7:30 a.m. Attendance: John Frey, Jim Jones, Anne Senning, Nell Walker, Jim Wood, and Karen Longeteig. This extraordinary meeting was scheduled to go over some of our requirements for the upcoming Tree Inventory. 1. Scribe: Karen Longeteig was appointed to take the minutes in her turn in the alphabetical rotation. 2. Minutes of the previous meetings were postponed until next regular meeting. 3. The Agenda, distributed by Chairman Frey, was reviewed and a couple of items added. 4. (4a.) Tree Inventory plans: There is an upcoming meeting with Sherri Brokaw of Community rd Forest Partnership on September 23. Anne will confirm the location and inform the rest by e-mail and telephone. There was a good deal of discussion as to our requirements for data fields in the software. However, the precise requests we need to ask at this time of Sherri and of Connie Rawson, our MIS director, are these: A. Load the street map of Lexington into our computers. B. In order to do the above, acquire and load the “ArcGIS 9” operating platform which turns CAD files into GIS files. Notes and reports on the Inventory: Dave Pinsonneault has ordered one hand-held computer, an IPAC. o Connie is approaching engineering and other departments for money for the ArcGIS 9, which o costs $3000, as this is a system which will be used in the future by all Town Departments. We are told that Peter Kerasotis (Engineering Dept.) has finished the mapping of the streets of o Lexington (in CAD). Our Memorandum of Understanding notes that the Maintenance Module will be worked out over o the winter, so for now we can concentrate on the “description” part of the Inventory. It may be easier to leave intact the GIS Tree Table Attributes than to attempt to greatly modify o them. However, we felt that one field definitely needed an addition to it: The Tree Location field should also have B = Berm, and T = Treeway. o (4b) For the fund-raising request from the Selectmen’s Fund for Lexington, we decided that only John Frey and Jim Woods should attend. 5. Draft Article for CLC Newsletter: Nell Walker distributed a draft which was approved. 6. Location of Tree Poem: John asked someone to run down a transcript of a remarkable poem on trees that he heard on NPR. Karen said she would. 7. Other Business: Grants and Trust Funds: Jim Wood said that the Tree Committee needs an enhanced scope of action by securing our own funds. There has been no line-item funding for trees by the Town in three or four years. Jim has spoken to former Town Counsel Norman Cohen; they noted that the Lexington Education Foundation and the Cary Library Trust are both non-profit corporations. Norm advised us against taking this route, but suggested that we could draft a proposal for a Fund that would be managed under the Town’s Trust Fund account, but with spending controlled by the Tree Committee. This way we could spend on an Inventory, watering, fertilizing, etc., and not just on buying trees to plant.