Bangor Tree Board reviews staffing gaps, red pine scale plan, and spring planting

[0:51] Gregory Edwards: ready to regularly scheduled meeting of the tree board day January 21st Greg [1:00] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Edwards on the chair of the tree board ourselves that's odd I'm Farron Mary's daughter member of the people [1:08] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): nominate retail member and we're going to see Bangalore working manager Sophie Cameron [1:15] Gregory Edwards: forest technician Jeff Davis director of engineering we just met like two weeks ago for workshop so it feels very feels weird being back from soon does everyone have a chance to look over the minutes last meeting except a motion to approve and it's written by ben thanks all right favor give the authority to do anything but you can attend forestry division [2:13] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): We had a wind storm mid-December, so that's when we had a lot of requests. Some of those requests are still pending because brush and debris that residents have put in is buried beneath the snow. So that's why they're still pending in C-Click Fix. As soon as the snow goes and either highway division or forestry division picks up that brush then I'll close out those. Despite my small crew we did 101 requests for that fourth quarter which is quite a lot. Typically we're right 60, 70 somewhere in that neighborhood. on preventive pruning so just like planting and other things we're doing we're kind of formalizing how we are doing work in forestry and with that i go out i identify corridors streets that need swimming when we do an entire length of a fleet end-to-end section of the intersection during this fourth quarter we did ohio street the southern end out towards from downtown to a 14th street extension warren yale patton walter sydney march cattell and crosby a little over nine miles of roads pruned sidewalk and street so tree removals didn't have too many in this fourth quarter most of them one that we removed abraham went to the school was a failure due to that storm that was a medium-sized norway maple that actually fell on two teachers vehicles caused property damage and so we removed them another was on hayward Woodward Street, unrelated, no storm damage. It was just a declining ash tree that had a broken upper canopy and so that one went down. Contractor, during the fourth quarter, no trees were removed by the contractor. However, we have been given a list to start with based on our inventory we completed in 2024. All the trees that were marked as zero, which means dead, they will be removing them. Still trying to find the fine line between trees that need to get contracted for that and then trees that my division can do, but those look like 61 total of trees based on the inventory inputs. 61 for the contractors to remove or just total? 61 total to be split up. Planting, fourth quarter planting, so that was after our last meeting in October. We planted 33 trees along those corridors that I spoke about. After planting season we were able to purchase at a deep discount 44 trees. Those 44 trees are now stored in the ground in pots over at Finson Nursery and those will get out planted as soon as spring rolls around and we get some good growing stock and growing conditions. We also purchased in preparation for spring planting 45 bare root trees from a nursery in upstate New York that will get shipped here. Can I provide clarification on that? So we're gonna put them in the gravel beds that we're building at Finson Nursery to keep them through the summer but then we're planting them out on streets in the fall. [6:31] Karen S. Marysdaughter: What was the name of the [6:32] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): nursery shit stalls yep they we spoke to Maine Audubon too recently because we're doing a Vincent is funded through a grant through them and Project Canopy and they like shit stalls they use them a lot yeah that's that's pretty much for if we're going to do I just thought it was a question when you go out and create a pruning [7:02] Unidentified speaker (Public Commenter): I assume that there's a height limitation that you could go to so do you find that you're not able to do as good a job because you can't reach certain areas that are we have a bucket truck are you [7:18] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): doing that forestry here because we're 75 feet but typically we're able to get anything that's real problematic or within the opening distance to power lines that is either contracted out or acclimated by the utilities here at the building. I think now it is Davy, Tree, I think, potentially. I've seen them around. They're a person's contractor and they run you all the power line pruning right okay great that's not a recent addition the bucket no we've always had a bucket truck we've got a new purchase of a bucket [8:05] Unidentified speaker (Public Commenter): Truck in 2023, I think. I guess the only reason why I'm asking as a city, as a resident, when I called to have my treat the street trees pruned, they could only get so far. They were like hopping on trucks and things like, you know, doing that is really get up to what other things that needed [8:23] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): to be pruned, so I just wanted to note that. Yeah, thanks. It is an eight foot clearance over sidewalks, so we only have to prune up to the clear eight feet on the sidewalk side, and then it's 14 feet [8:36] Unidentified speaker (Public Commenter): on the roadside. Okay, so if there are dead branches above that, yeah, they're just gonna [8:40] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): they're gonna stay there until they fall. If they're, yeah, if they're hazardous, we will deal [8:46] Unidentified speaker (Public Commenter): with it. And I don't mean to give you a hard time, but that's what I'm, I thought. Yeah, yep. Okay, I [8:51] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): think when Ben talks about like the routine corridor pruning though, it's just to maintain [8:56] Gregory Edwards: that eight foot or 14 foot. I see. Yeah, I guess staffing update. Yes, a bit more staff, so this [9:08] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): is this is one of the negative items. Oh, okay. So fourth division staffing, we'll start with a positive spin. So Sophia Cameron is a joint component, so Sophia Cameron was offered a full-time position with forestry division. She has accepted. It is a shared position with parks and recreation, so she will be writing parks and recreation forest management plans, other projects as Tracy and Deb see fit under her position, and then we'll handle the back end payroll as needed, but she is a full-time employee to be here. She's really picked up the logistics of urban force management plan, organizing everything, things of that nature. On the downside, B, Arborist 1, Arborist 2, and HE01. As you all know, for quite a while, we have not had an Arborist 1 position filled at the forestry division. We previously had a HE01 individual, heavy equipment operator. That heavy equipment operator was offered an arborist one position. They could not fulfill for the collective bargaining agreement the licensing and certain standards for that position. They were knocked back down to HEO1 position. That lasted for about eight, nine months, something like that, and then just recently they left public works for other employment. So now forestry division is myself and one heavy equipment operator. With that being said, the new public works director and I are working on Creating job postings and we're going to be hiring outside of the normal hiring times to fill those vacancies. Typically they wanted to have a bulk hiring event and then, you know, fill vacancies as they saw fit, but now we're just going to have a HE01 position posted specifically for forestry division and then still have the arborist one position posted like we had in the past because that vacancy is there, so we'll [12:02] Gregory Edwards: keep our hopes up. Yeah, this is, this is like a benefit though, I mean, for as long as I have been, forever, so I feel hopeful now that we [12:14] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): have a director that's a good story. Yeah, that things will move in the right direction. Yeah, absolutely. [12:22] Gregory Edwards: Okay. What was the piece on forestry tech? That's Sophie. Yes, that's my role. Cool. Urban forestry management and workshop review. So we've met like two weeks ago to go over the community engagement survey and website. Sarah and Sophie and Ben have been working more diligently than I on updating all those based on the workshop. I sent out a link with a, I guess it's a live version of the form that will eventually be going out once the website layout is more like a Word document that will go on the website. Are there any comments on that or do you want to go over [13:19] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): the updates that you and Sarah have made? Sure, Sarah, do you, I don't know if she's, hi Sarah, do you want to go first or I can talk about the meeting I have with Dave about the web page? Sure, that would be good to cover. Okay, so Ben and I got a chance to sit down with Dave Warren to kind of come up with a more solid plan about web page. Specifically, it is going to actually be hosted through the forestry division web page. I know before we said that it would be hosted externally. That was a miscommunication, but we spoke with him and he thinks, I mean, we're gonna obviously put it before the IC committee tonight because we don't want to surprise them with anything, but as long as you guys don't have any adjustments to make the language or anything at this point, he said it can be built and ready to go as early as either the end of this week or the beginning of next week. At that point, Ben, myself and Sarah will sit down and kind of go through it and talk to him and make tweaks and then Hopefully by the end of the month we'll have a social media post that goes out to announce that it's open and hopefully start getting engagement and again like as long as the survey doesn't get any comments from you guys tonight and we don't find any other edits to make through the infrastructure committee meeting that we'll be ready to hopefully go live by the end of the month as well so those things will kind of line up in terms of announcement stuff and we did clarify that we are allowed to Use the alert system. Oh good. Yeah, we just can't do it very much. So we're, Sarah and I were talking and we're going to prioritize certain things that we put out. Yeah, did I miss anything? [15:24] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Okay, that's my update. I have a question, just a confusion. It seems to me that at the workshop maybe somebody said we already have had a tree canopy assessment done for Bangor. [15:38] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Am I confused there, Sarah, a tree canopy? Sorry, I was like searching my memory. Have you, we are currently completing one. Okay, I think Sarah went over the preliminary findings. [15:53] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Okay, because I remember you were showing something on the screen, Sarah, but then when I followed the [15:58] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): link it was just generic tree canopy information. Okay, yeah, right, yeah, so we are completing one right now. And yes, so feel like you mentioned, I shared some information from that at the last tree board meeting. And that will be included in the urban forest management plan. [16:20] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Well, I'll just say I was happy with the changes I saw from your works. [16:27] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): And if anyone, I mean, within the next day, spend some time looking it over and has last minute adjustments, investments just left and square away before we put everything out into the universe. Okay. [16:44] Gregory Edwards: Cool, we got just forestry division projects, something new. I did, I knew we had a red scale. [16:52] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): I'm solid, we had a response plan. So as part of Sophie's employment here for an eye, I work in tandem with Parks and Rec and other land holders in the city, be it Community Economic Development, Bangor High School, in coming up with a plan for red pine scale. What red pine scale is, a very small insect that infests red pine trees, takes the nutrients from the tree and then causes severe and very rapid decline in red pine trees. If you go out for its MDI there is not one standing red pine tree left on the entire island. This means moving now with predominant winds brought through like Cherry Field and then up through the Route 9 corridor spreading pretty rapidly from MDI thanks to the predominant winds that carry it. We're making preventive measures by having this plan written to identify areas within the city that have pure red fine stands. Those were planted for site remediation reforestation. And that's just one of the issues in dealing with a monoculture is having the insect go through and specifically target one species. And now we have a whole forest stand at risk of complete and utter failure just because of that monoculture. So, Sophie has written a plan and we're looking to bring it to the structure to get approval. There's a good map of locations of Red Pines Tale in the state on page nine. That's put together by Bill Domenech at the Forest Service. We've been in touch with him. He's kind of local to the Bangor area. Area. I think he's up in Old Town. So he also gets eyes on red pine around the area quite often. So hopefully we'll be able to catch this pretty quickly if it does come in to Bangalore. Things to highlight. Like Ben said, we have quite a few of these plantations. There are maps of each of them throughout here. So one of the larger ones of note is behind the high school next to Prentice Woods. There's a smaller one in Essex Woods that is, we actually kind of got started on working on that. A lot of the issues that are going to arise from this are sort of post mortality of red pine because these trees are planted in places they weren't supposed to be in the first place. They were just kind of en masse put out, which was typical of that time period as a way to do kind of reforestation efforts. But because of that, not a lot of things are growing up underneath these trees. So what we did at Essex Woods was an initial mechanical removal of invasive woody plants that we found there. We got about 50% of that plantation done this past fall. And we will be using integrated pest management strategies to continue to manage any invasives that are under these stands because the issue that arises when these trees start to die, they create gaps for light to hit the forest floor which then they take off and then they're out of control. So we're doing this kind of as a three-stage intervention strategy where we're first dealing with the invasives, getting those under our belt, then we're going in and we're removing the already dead trees that have died of other causes or the trees that are just considered to be the losers, the ones that haven't grown very well, they're stunted, they've been affected by other diseases. In Winterport Pit specifically, there's a porcupine issue. So there are a lot of them that have been taken out by porcupines. And then we'll hopefully be able to hang on for a few more years before red pine scale comes into the city or into Winterport where we also have a property and they will be able to continue to grow for that period of time but eventually it is a large scale removal of these trees just to prevent safety issues and also capture any value that they may have and that'll all be performed as a combination of through Ben and whoever we bring on in the next couple of months, and then also contracted bugs. And that's the gist, but I would encourage you to read through this. It's not as, there's no way to treat them in a forested setting, unfortunately, so it's not as overarching as the EAB plan. [22:14] Gregory Edwards: Is there a way to treat them as like, specimen trees? [22:16] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Yeah, if you have one that's small enough, because a lot of people get those like ornamental red pines, dwarf red pines, I think is, I don't know what the actual horticultural term is, but you can spray horticultural oil, which I think it's just neem oil, right, over them. And you do that twice a year to match up with the hatch of the insect and that provides pretty good control but as you can imagine in a forested setting with 50 to 80 foot tall trees that's not really a viable option unfortunately no there's no way in intravenously no unfortunately not that would require a I don't think there's a ton of research on it and also I don't think they know they essentially just latch on to the venous tissue on the exterior of the stem and they don't bore through the wood so I don't think they're able to like really suck up enough material to be effective. I haven't done a ton of research into it. I just talked to the folks at the Maine Forest Service, and they're like, it's kind of a wash, unfortunately. Yeah, you do. Yeah, they don't, yeah, because red pine wood is not as big of a firewood product, and also because oftentimes the branches get bucked off and left in the woods, there's not as much spread through like human modes of transportation, so a lot of it is wind-based. So for that reason it is slower moving than EAB. This could be used for lumber. Yeah, if they're big enough. I don't know that we have very many that are big enough. Some of the ones in Apprentice, I think. Yeah. [24:20] Gregory Edwards: The mechanical removal you were doing, is that just going out chopping? Yeah. [24:26] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): If you go over to Essex Woods, you'll see like a bunch of multicolored little pieces of flagging throughout there. That was me going around and flagging the trees we wanted to keep. And then everything else was either taken down with like a, what is that tool called? A rough saw. Yeah. A little spacing. So obviously we'd whack it with a saw blade. Yeah, and then or like I had pruners that I was going around and just chopping things off, but intention. Yeah, any plan to also use herbicide? That's part of the IPM strategy. We're gonna see this spring how what we already took down grows back. Likely we'll be using herbicide in the fall, but that's always going to be in conjunction with continued mechanical removal, just because we want to be conservative. Yes, it's just usually when you cut down a stem you get like eight little steps. Yeah, I mean comes harder. So what that would be is a, we would do a basil bark application, which is just like a little, it's almost like a dauber, like it looks like a bingo thing. You just apply it with a little bit of dye so you can see the stumps. They fit. So that's the current trend. Okay. [25:50] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Is this something that has happened before and it's on a cyclical basis, or is this something new? It's an invasive insect. It's from Asia. [26:03] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): It was first introduced into, I believe, New York through the World's Fair on ornamental introductions. That's a thought anyway. When it was introduced in New York, they don't have as large of continuous populations of red pine as there is in like northern New England. So I think it kind of spread across New York a bit. It was in Connecticut, had a heck of a time with it for a while, and it's newer to us. I don't recall hearing about it until like 2020, 20 in Inver Harbor. Yeah, so yeah, it has, isn't something we've dealt with before. We [26:49] Gregory Edwards: Can stop importing plants. Yeah, city forest wildfire management mitigation. Well, forestry [27:04] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): division has had a contractor in the city forest completing a step budget now to wildfire mitigation along the main roads. This was all in conjunction to follow the management plan written by David Irving, and it essentially is renewing the overstocked softwood and hardwood trees along the roads within the city forest, and what this does is it creates a fire break. If anybody was to be smoking a cigarette and they were to toss it off the edge of the road, it's not going to go into the sand of highly flammable million trees per acre of fir. There's going to be a bit of a gap before the forest edge, so a little bit of a fire break there. There's a map on the last phase. During this entry the contractor was able to go from the trick drive parking area all the way to the easy virgo bed. All thick dense sections of the roads have been thinned out. Everything has been blown back into the woods so all the nutrients are staying in the woods and spread out on a fine layer, and you can kind of expect to see regrowth in the summertime. It's probably going to revert back to grasses and other, you know, apartment suckers just like you mentioned earlier, but this is kind of a long-term thing. It's looking like at this progress it might take three years to do all the forest roads. Are [28:55] Gregory Edwards: they paying any special attention to invasives they see along those as they're in there today? [29:02] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Sophie and the other interns have already mapped the invasives that are noted, and then in follow-up in sprouting this spring we'll be able to see basically invasive sprout first, so whatever greens up first is likely buckthorn, and most of the invasive species are found along the roads due to contaminated fill and things of that nature, but there really isn't too much in there if you go to of some of the landings and storage areas where Park and Rec and Forestry keep grindings and stuff like that. That's where most of the invasives are. And this is almost two miles of roads that we're able to get in three weeks time. [29:55] Karen S. Marysdaughter: So this was the first year of three year? [29:57] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Yes. I'm anticipating it. And each road is different based on the density and how much they have to actually be injections [30:15] Gregory Edwards: yeah we're doing 500 trees this spring 400 and so that's [30:23] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): What we are aiming for, 127 I believe, yeah. So we are looking and gearing up both Sophie and for this, so I've been studying for that exam, and then as a backup, our cemetery sexton, who was already a master pesticide applicator, will be testing in February for outdoor ornamental, just in the rare case that due to scheduling I've missed the window for an exam and injection time. So we'll have that as a backup to keep all injections in-house without going through a contractor to save on the contracted costs, because we already have a waiver account and it would just be material that we would have to fund, so you will see a lot more blue dots pop up around April. It'd [31:30] Gregory Edwards: be great if we had some sort of informational things to put out at the same time. We do have [31:36] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): I made up signs last year. I think the issue was how long ahead of it do we put them out, because they do tend to disappear. So but we do have to post before we do anything. Yeah, that's true. So that was kind of our way of doing that, but I am thinking about how we can improve that system moving forward if [32:03] Gregory Edwards: I mean if they were 8 1⁄2 by 11 like laminated sheets and somehow attached to, that's what we kind [32:09] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): of did, it was like a stake and but I states are super easy. Yeah, such a little service area attached. Yeah, so I think we're gonna come up with a better plan, whether it be like posting for a full park and just like one location that's like more prominent, or because where we need to post most is like places that are often accessed by people, so like if it's out behind at the back of the cemetery or something like less so that people are going to be seeing it, but yeah, we're going to try to come up with a better system. If you brainstorm and want to give me ideas, that would be helpful. Well, [32:53] Karen S. Marysdaughter: I went and looked over your whole EAB section again. I haven't looked in a while, and it's excellent. I think we've really enhanced it a lot, and I was especially impressed with this private ash treatment guide you got from, is it Main Forest Service or somebody? Yeah, [33:14] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): yeah, I thought that was very good. They're a really good resource for anybody that wants to ask questions about that kind of stuff. Allison Canote, she's an invaluable resource around this kind of stuff. [33:29] Karen S. Marysdaughter: And the list of pesticide applicators, although it's alphabetical by the name of the company, as if it was by town, but still, it's great that link is there. I did notice this wording somewhere. It said, helping to develop community-wide set of instructions on how to manage EAB on private property. So was that something that's [33:51] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): in the works or? That was language developed while Aaron was still here. I think before he departed there was an intention for him to speak to folks here in City Hall to sort of sort out some solutions. There was talk about like possibly looking at grant funding for low-income neighborhoods. I think that might have fallen off the radar at some point. I think there's every intention to still do that, but yeah, we got caught up in figuring out our piece of things, and we had lost the person spearheading the private side of stuff. So I do think that'll come back at some point. It's just a matter of capacity at this [34:40] Gregory Edwards: point. Sounds like a good use of community block grant funds. That was, I think, the thought initially. [34:47] Karen S. Marysdaughter: So when you say low-income neighborhoods, that you, there might be financial help for, there was [34:52] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): thought that because it poses a safety hazard and low-income neighborhoods may not be able to properly deal with that issue on their own because of financial reasons, that there could be that avenue to explore grant funding. I don't know that we ever came up or brainstormed any ideas around non-low-income neighborhoods aside from possibly helping to facilitate community interaction to figure out like a neighborhood-wide solution independently from public works. [35:31] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Well, you're beautiful. We were talking about ways to get the word out to people who have their own ashtrays and sending them to the website. I think now would be, yeah, that's, that's what we'd want to do is figure out a way to get information out to people so they'll go to that website. Yeah. That's separate from financial setups, but just a sort of a public [35:56] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): awareness. Yeah, totally. I think too, it's obviously going to be a much larger footprint of the number of trees that we're treating come spring, and I think that's going to mean that we do another round of like public engagement stuff around it, so that will help as well. And then also as you guys communicate to people, I mean, Ben and I are always willing to answer questions, so if people want to call and talk about it, we can point them in the right direction of how to get resources for stuff like this. And [36:28] Karen S. Marysdaughter: So who would be, if to go back to the plan that Aaron had put energy into, who would be following up on that? Would that be you all? Would that be some committee of [36:38] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): the council? Who, correct me if I'm wrong, I would imagine that would be an idea we would have to take to the new public works director, and then he would work with the other departments, specifically like planning, and I don't know if it would be Community and Economic Development, but kind of the folks in this building to figure that out. That would be more of a community development side of things than a forestry side of things, programs [37:08] Gregory Edwards: for, yeah, different, you know, people inside the city of Bangor. Well, I can apply for grants for different things to improve their private property if it proves a low-income area. So it could be, you know, that could be just another program that someone could apply for, yeah, for grant funding, yeah. And I think maybe [37:29] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): an opportunity once we move into this new phase is to reintroduce that idea to the new public works director and explore his, how we can get that shuffled along. Is there somebody [37:44] Karen S. Marysdaughter: in community development that it makes sense to be the point person there to talk to? You'd [37:50] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): not better, I imagine my go-to is typically Ann, and then she defers to whoever has a project opening or oversight over a certain thing. Last I heard they were fully staffed, so yes, there's [38:06] Gregory Edwards: probably people in the ranks that manage programs like that, and there are, and I'm trying to think [38:12] Unidentified speaker (Public Commenter): of her name, but there is a specific person, yeah, because that would be an excellent [38:20] Karen S. Marysdaughter: resource for people, yeah, because it's going to be an expensive proposition for people to deal with [38:25] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): their pastures. Absolutely, I do wonder if there's a lack of urgency at this time because we don't have the insect in the city, and that there might be prioritization of those funds for use elsewhere, so that is also a question to ask. It might be good if people at least, it's [38:46] Karen S. Marysdaughter: on their radar, because when it does show up in the city, then they'll need to be, yeah, in terms of grant lead times, it's going to be a short period of time before people are going to need help, and we get the conversation started, yeah, get the conversation started. [39:03] Gregory Edwards: I mean, that funding is supposed to be helping the neighborhoods in general. So if we're using it to save the ash trees in their parks, like if you look around Cape Heart, it's mostly ash trees. [39:16] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Oh, there's a couple of streets that are all ash trees. Exactly. [39:19] Gregory Edwards: Yes. And most of those are city trees. So and I know funding the herbicide is going to be a piece of what you guys want to do. [39:28] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Yeah. Yeah, I think now that we're in house, we're going to see how this next year goes. We did lower the injection volume from what the original estimate was going to be because of new research that came out, not new, but research that we found that was new to us, suggesting that we could do that. So I mean, we're going to see how far we can get on our own budget. Budget and then from there that'll kind of inform the requests we make into the future about what we need specifically for this. But I think we do anticipate all of the public trees being covered by like our funding as opposed to trying to seek out grants for that, just because it did seem like the city councillors were on board and I think everyone here is aligned with how we're going to approach this. Yeah. [40:19] Gregory Edwards: That's hopeful. I was terrified when we first were like, we're gonna treat a thousand trees and I'm like, we can't even plant like 50 trees. I mean, when [40:29] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): you look at the numbers, it saves them a lot of money in the long run. I know. Yeah, to do it this [40:35] Gregory Edwards: way we also just didn't have a lot of people who were certified to do yeah injections. Yeah, totally. That was that's a scary unknown, but now that we have both of you well trained, it's gonna [40:46] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): It's going to be fun. It's going to be like three straight weeks of... Cool. [40:55] Gregory Edwards: Any other questions on EAB before we go through the photos, Sprague,, Sprague? We purchased them from different places. Sourcing has been, we've only been doing this like three years, but sourcing has been a little difficult. The Lake Sprague sells cultivars of some of the natives. Maine Audubon still sells straight species, but they're tiny. So I want to do Main Street, we want to do Main Street, and my plan was to do slightly, because the last planting we did was all for Maine Audubon, and they were very tiny, and I don't know how well they're going to do right now. These on Main Street have a history of being wiped out by snow plows and stuff because these this was all planted as part of Main Street's re renovation like 10 15 years ago and all the trees that were called for most of them are gone on this section. So my thought was to do you know number 10 number 15 sized pots which will be bigger trees will be six eight feet tall and do mostly red maples and oaks and a couple service areas where there are overhead issues like just a traffic light there are No overhead power lines through there. My other thought was because some of these were set up with beds in place and they actually have like granite cobblestone borders was flanking the trees on either side with low grow fragrance favorite sumac that gets like that tall to hopefully help protect the trees from I don't know anything keep the keep the soil a little more impervious and maybe present some sort of sign to as they're plowing or doing snow removal holes this isn't the one that kind of [43:08] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): grows out. I don't think so. I think it's like very... I know there's like a ground cover one that doesn't get super tall but it does go crazy. Okay I think it's it's that one but I don't know [43:22] Gregory Edwards: how crazy it gets. I've seen it. I would want to print a picture of it. There's a there's a really good picture of it being planted with red maples in a parking lot island and it you know it stays [43:38] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): is contained in that island yeah they're one of my favorite shrubs I just if we're talking about [43:44] Gregory Edwards: the same thing yeah I just wonder about foot traffic right the sidewalks through there are like 10 feet okay at least 10 feet wide like it's a it's almost a multi-use trail so I don't think we I don't think it would be a problem yeah so my thought was planting you know two on either side and then hopefully that will I don't know reinforce get because a tree out on its own like there's no protection from snow banks and stuff whereas if there was some sort of ground cover and something there yeah it might keep it a little bit I don't know I also did have a [44:23] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): conversation with Betsy Lundy about downtown specifically and trying to figure out like possibly temporary blockades for protection so I think when we flush that idea out a little bit the more we can touch base with you and possibly yeah loop you into that especially during winter [44:41] Gregory Edwards: yeah I've seen in New York City they like build wooden cages around the trees I've seen that too [44:46] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): I mean it's pretty effective yeah and it's a lot of work that's something we've proposed at one point or another for like when paving is going by to protect yes [44:57] Gregory Edwards: Yes, and then Belfast does like wooden, they build like a little wall around it that's there permanently to keep dogs and foot traffic stepping directly in the tree wells. The last time that was proposed, they're, they're worried about it getting eaten up by big snow machines. Yeah, and then another thing that works really well are just granite curbing, which Jefferson's done some of through West Market Square, yeah, to like create some sort of physical there. Yeah. [45:32] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Yeah, the work they're going to be doing downtown doesn't go out Main Street at all. You mean the, why, no, I mean there's that whole plan to re, redo downtown village partnership. [45:46] Gregory Edwards: Thank you, Village Partners. I don't think it does. I think it stops at Cedar Street. I also, so that it's going to be piecemeal, so it's, you know, this is, I don't think this is on the right. [45:57] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Oh, okay, around existing trees, so if you plant something, they, whoever does it is kind of required to be careful. That actually works out really well, and I don't think we planned this. I think you. [46:12] Gregory Edwards: Mentioned it because like there's so much room on Main Street. Well, yeah, so we're going, our spring is. [46:19] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): It spring or fall? I will check and let you know, either spring or fall. We are planting between Cedar and Barker Street and then up onto First Street. All right, and then First Street across Davenport to Union, the back of Davenport. Yeah, and I think we're also putting like three trees in Davenport Park. There. [46:51] Gregory Edwards: Are 13 red oaks and maples. I was just going to alternate them and free service berries, so 16 trees. I'll work on sourcing and get numbers for our next meeting. I just wanted to get something in front of us. Is it full sun on that part of Main Street? It is a little shade. You can see the north. [47:19] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Could that be solved with pruning? [47:22] Gregory Edwards: Parts of it are very sunny. Parts of it are shaded by large trees. [47:26] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): I would urge you to put the oaks in the sunnier spots. They don't love shade. I felt like it was pretty sunny when I was out there. Yeah. I think it depends on the time of day. Yeah. [47:44] Karen S. Marysdaughter: It's pretty hot. It's pretty open. Yeah, it's pretty hot. [47:47] Gregory Edwards: Right. I've walked it. The east side has all the western sun exposure. Yeah. And it's like southwest facing. So southwest sun coming in. So it should be pretty bright. [48:04] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): But you can see there are three big. [48:06] Gregory Edwards: Yeah, there definitely were a few really shady steps. But it's hard to know how long those trees will be there. [48:12] Karen S. Marysdaughter: This, you know what factories those are, the ones that are. [48:15] Gregory Edwards: I know one of them is a Norway Maple. [48:17] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Most of those are Norway Maples. It's a little volunteer Maple and it drops down to the concert venue. [48:25] Gregory Edwards: We had to cut a branch because the panels are right there and one of the panels was like there was a tree like hanging over the fence and on some seats it wasn't a city well it's technically a city tree because that's a city property sorry yeah so that's that's the plan for spring I'll come back next meeting with numbers and I did originally map that out with the underground utilities there's almost nothing except for some storm water on that side and electrical but the electrical is just running between the walls yeah the light poles and you [49:15] Karen S. Marysdaughter: want to use that method that the stockholm method of building the box underground contract the [49:22] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): digging crew for an entire week we could certainly do that yeah i think we'd be hard-pressed to do [49:29] Gregory Edwards: maybe we could do a pilot project what if we just drilled lots of holes in the asphalt in the in the sidewalk there so water could get down and air could get down through [49:40] Karen S. Marysdaughter: well there's the permeable surfaces now that would require removing all the asphalt yes right [49:47] Gregory Edwards: installing a permeable like under surface and then paving with permeable yeah it's someday It makes sense in dense urban areas like downtown, if we used any of the like, because there's that whole like TIF funding, like, you know, we'd used the money we spent on heated sidewalks on building amazing tree bases, we could have really great trees. Okay. That's it. Yeah. Any new business? Yeah. [50:23] Unidentified speaker (Public Commenter): Well, I mean, I think you kind of touched on it about when sidewalks are redone and doing things in a better way that'll overall be good for a lot of reasons. are we going to at some point discuss things like that or you know as far as the tree canopy assessment but like areas that we know putting trees will obviously help but when you don't have an area of planting wide enough I mean do we ever start to talk about infrastructure where maybe the sidewalks don't have to be five feet in a particular location because conversations I mean [51:04] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): But are we going to talk about things like that? We've we've started with the new director looking at certain projects that other locations do, be it pavement removal, a shared streets concept where pedestrians, bicycle traffic share streets with vehicles, yeah, versus sandwiching two sidewalks into an area. Where they thought of that recently based on traffic volume, and that's all engineering and city question, but we've begun the conversations as far as looking at our right of ways based on the traffic volume. Do we actually need right-of-ways and pavement that big in certain areas? So I mean, we've all seen trees that are either like the roots are cut right down or you know, they were gonna take my green space. I had to fight for my yeah, and you know, looking at areas like Maple Street and West Broadway, it's two lanes of traffic, it's the same dimension that is Union Street, all four lanes, 50 feet, two lanes of traffic, so. [52:24] Unidentified speaker (Public Commenter): So the discussion will start with you guys. We're working on it. And will it make its way to this committee? [52:32] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Yeah, I think once projects are actually in motion, which could take some time, just because they've been doing things a certain way for a very long time and trying to incite change is hard. But we are, it's on the top of mind, and especially now that we're revisiting how we do plantings, I think it's going to be a conversation that keeps coming up. I personally am feeling [53:02] Gregory Edwards: very passionate about it, so and I know this past fall, I think it was us whenever [53:09] Unidentified speaker (Public Commenter): it was that you sent me some information, a number of our neighbors were concerned about trees being taken down on Central Street, but they were, it's part of a main DOT project. And they were, some of the people were just thinking, you mean the tree board or the city has no say over taking trees down or, I mean, or your group in general. Once I mentioned on the page that I was on the committee, I think it's strange that the committee, the tree board doesn't have a say on this. [53:41] Karen S. Marysdaughter: And then I'm just D. O. T. Project. I mean, or I assume that's also an issue with version. [53:49] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): As far as dot projects, I think city approval for that particular project goes all the way back to, I think, 2,016. So I think they went through the process and did like the structure modifications and that whole intersection plan was approved in 2016. So like 10 years ago when I started looking at it, some of that had gone through the appropriate panels, just not briefly. But if I recall too, when we were doing our last, and I can look back at my notes, when we were doing our last urban forest management plan like group meeting, I think we mentioned to Sarah that one of the priorities of the UFMP is to like create a system of communication not necessarily for DOT or Versant but like for engineering, like it becomes more of a conversation as opposed to these things have to come down, right? Yeah, it's kind of a question of where it lives. [54:53] Gregory Edwards: Because like there ought to be some best practices for how we're installing trees, and I think it also needs to cohabitate with how we build sidewalks and roads, yeah, and put in natural gas lines, right? And I know Jefferson's working on a complete streets plan. I'm wondering if it almost like referenced in that some way, because you know if you have a street with really good free canopy and like buffers from traffic, you have a complete street. [55:18] Unidentified speaker (City Staff): Like it achieves that same goal. Yeah, so we have a meeting on Monday that would be a great thing to bring up while Jefferson and all of us are in there at one o'clock. I didn't until yesterday. [55:37] Karen S. Marysdaughter: Yeah, just being on the tree board and then watching the natural gas line go in and right through the roots of both the ash trees on the front of our property, you know, they're just a short distance from that tree, they had to be chopping out a lot of roots, and it's like wait a minute, does anybody have a say over what's happening to these trees? Hopefully we're working on it, okay. [Gregory Edwards: Anything else? Very.] Efficient, we're done early. Thank you for having me at this meeting. Thank you Sarah, thank you everyone, speak to you on Monday.