 It's a 533. I will be starting webinar live so I want to join us and we use and we'll be recording this from this point forward. We'll be available. Believe they make them all available. Friday afternoon on the town website. So Ellen and Julian here so we'll have a Quorum. Hi Ellen. Britt. How are things. Okay, thanks. Happy New Year to everyone. Hi Britt, hi Julian. Hi everyone. So missing Sarah and Shashana one of them said they couldn't make it. I thought Shashana said that too, but I'm not positive about that. Let's see if I can find it. Sarah can't make it and I think Shashana said that she was going to be on the road. That sounds right. Okay. So I guess we're it. Bennett you're going to do the minutes. Yes. Okay. And can somebody else share the screen I guess I don't have to make you. Anyone else have the. Agenda. I can find it and share it if you want. Yeah. So Alan rough to make you a co-chair. Or co whatever is called co-host. That way I'll keep track of the participants. We all set you. We lose here. Britt. Still around. No, I'm here. I'm just getting my husband's at time. Just getting everybody dinner. So I'm just going to turn my screen off for sure. All right. Welcome everyone. We're on, we can start the meeting. Waiting for Julian to call up the agenda. Let me do hours while we're waiting. Um, that's. Um, Probably just one. Well, the meeting is an hour and a half plus. We met since the last meeting, I think. Yep. That's what I was counting. So what? I was counting that. Okay. So three. Sure. Okay. Uh, Bennett. Uh, three and a half. We don't do halves for. Uh, Julian. Probably like four or five. Five. Okay. Me. I don't think I did that much this month. I'll say seven. All right. I'm left to find her from Sarah and Shoshana and. When you come back on. We're just. Yeah, I'm probably at, um, Probably at three. Okay. Slow start, but that's how it normally is in the air. See if anybody else is waiting to come in. No. Can you all see the agenda pulls up strangely on my computer. It's kind of backwards in a weird way. It's backwards in a way. It's funny. But it works. That's okay. Has the wrong date. So that's all right. It doesn't matter. We know what it is. All right. Call to order. We did ours. Any announcements. No announcements. Okay. No public comments, obviously. Um, The minutes from December. Yeah. Yeah, I ever approved them, Ellen. Julian. I wasn't at that meeting. So. Okay. Um, Britt. Yes. Okay. Um, so we need to, we have a quorum. I guess this four of us. So we're there. So all right. The minutes are approved. Okay. Committee reports. I don't have much to report. Um, April and planning our, um, where our work days are going to be. And we're going to do the sustainability festival again. So if you get to, uh, Make sure we've somebody should probably mute there. We should figure out what we're going to have on the table and make sure we have all the signs and all the other stuff we need and trees. We can talk about that as an agenda item. Um, and then the other thing is, um, you know, I've, I've always liked each person on the committee to have a project that they're working on. And, uh, Stuff that they bring to the meeting rather than me always saying, all right, this is here. So, um, I think some of us are working on some projects, but let's think about that more and try to get. More, more stuff going. I think there's a lot of unfinished projects. Like the, um, Sarah has been working on the, uh, Um, large tree, um, whatever it's called, um, brain is not working. Uh, anyway, significant tree ordinance. Thank you. Good. Okay. And other projects. Yeah. Um, and for me, it's the state stuff that I started working on and then don't continue working on. So anyway, let's think about working on projects and getting more stuff done off of the, uh, the to-do list. And, um, Um, The only other thing I have, uh, I heard from someone who wants some trees had some trees taken down. I named David rudderman on Greenwich street. Did I talk about this last month or tell you, Alan? 64 Greenwich street. So I, he wrote to the, uh, The tree committee email and, um, He apparently wrote in December and nobody responded. So he wrote again. So, uh, I don't know if we don't really have trees to plant for people, but, um, I don't really want to say that. I'd rather that we figure out a way that we can plant trees. So I want to bring that up as a agenda that my guess, or as a brainstorm. We could plant in the general neighborhood and include in front of that property. That's true. Uh, Is Greenwich street a possibility, Alan? You're muted. I'm, uh, pulling up right now. What's that? I'm trying to pull it up on that. My inventory program. Keep talking. Okay. Okay. So, um, yeah, I mean, otherwise we could use committee funds and do our own plantings kind of thing. We don't even have to include Alan. We don't have a truck. We don't have water, but we could make the homeowners do the watering. So that's not an issue. I mean, you know, I mean, if we could get some buckets of wood chips, we could find a tree. There's some trees that we have that we got for free. And then we could buy a tree, perhaps. So what do people think? Do we have a sense of. I mean, I don't know that neighborhood. I feel like we should prioritize funds for. Folks who cannot reasonably. Yeah. That's a good point. Although I kind of like supporting people who ask for trees. Like, you know, they're more likely to take care of the trees too. So. Yeah. I mean, I think that's a point too, right? If you're thinking about like collective. Community level ecosystem services. Yeah. Yeah. I would more push for just including it on our planting list for next year. We need more locations to plant. And I think that's a good neighborhood that we've worked in before. So. Where is Greenwich street. I'm looking it up right now. Is near Long Meadow and Glendale where we planted on me. It's I think one street over south from Long Meadow. Okay. So why don't we look into that as a possible planting location for this year. How long can you do that? Yes. Great. If that doesn't work, then. We'll get back to him with something else, but. But think about that, you know, how we can do planting. So people that ask for trees and. Well, how we can do plantings for. You know, one, you know, low income homeowner say, you know, I don't know if this guy could be or not. I don't know, but we're not even a homeowner renters. We'd have to work with the landlord a little bit, but maybe there's maybe this public right away in front of their homes or I don't know. I think what we could do is like have a form where like. Folks like fill out a Google form and say, I'd like a tree and then we can prioritize sort of who lives in. More minority communities and we could go around and even say like, hey, listen, can you afford a tree? If not, we'll try to help. Okay. I'm happy to just go plant the tree anytime someone asks for it. Especially if they want to pay for the tree, but. How many requests do we get for, you know, I feel like when I first joined this committee. I could be making this up, but I feel like. Alan, you received, you would periodically receive requests. From homeowners and just had just because of. Resourcing and capacity and costs and that kind of stuff or kind of in a, the unfortunate position of just having to say no all the time. Do is this, I mean, I haven't heard anything about a request. And then quite in a while. Is this like the one that we'll get for six months probably, or do we get them once a week? Or like, because what I don't want to do, like. I totally agree with your instincts to like somebody wants a tree. That's figure out a way to plant a tree. You know what I, what I. I don't want to get in a position where. You know, 20 people ask them, we have to see like, well, we said yes to this person. We said no to that person. You know, suddenly it's a different type of dynamic. It may not be, you know, like it may rarely get requests these days. Yeah, so I get requests, you know, barely regularly, mostly in the spring and, you know, summertime or maybe in the fall, you know, not, you know, it's, I don't know, probably maybe 20 or so requests might come in to me directly. But I mean, without, without the funding to purchase trees. You know, I usually just tell folks that we'll. Try to get to them at some point in the. Planting season. So when usually what I did last year was when the. Shedgie committee was doing a tree planting. I would order trees. During the tree planting. And then we would plant trees on the Saturday. Frequently they happen to be in the area where people requested trees, which was very helpful. And then a couple of times I purchased the trees and then I planted them, you know, with my crew, you know, the week or so later, or before, depending upon when I picked up the trees. So they, they've been getting planted. You haven't really had a lot of requests. Well, we used to. It used to be on the website request a tree. Yeah. And especially during the 2000 tree initiative. You know, people would request and they knew we had trees and we had. So we were actively doing that. When that ran out and we were running, starting to run low on money, we've removed that. And it was too much for Alan's crew to do that. So we removed it from the website. We're not offering it. So people still come to us though, occasionally. So that's the second one I've got in the last few months. A lot of times when we take down a tree in front of somebody's house, I asked them, you know, would you be interested in having a tree? You know, especially if I have to do a setback planting, you know, a plant in front of your house again, and I kind of get a sense of where they are or not. So then it's process of arranging to have the stump ground down and, you know, coordinating the purchasing and selection purchasing and planting of the tree. So it's still all happening. It's just happening. It's slower. Yeah. So, you know, if we step up to this, then it saves Alan's crew. It saves money and time and everything too. So. I think we, especially when they come directly to us instead of down. So maybe I'll contact him and just sound it out. We don't actively have the program. We don't have a budget for it exactly, but we'd be happy to help you. Can you pay for the tree? That sort of thing. Yeah. I've done that a little bit on my own. All right, I'll contact him and get back to them. Yeah. All right. So that's some, that's my chair's report. Julian. Yeah. So. The first thing I was going to mention was the person who requested the tree on Greenwich. The second thing that I had was it looked like there were a few emails in there like that seemed to be mostly spam, like you owe this much, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Seemed to be just spam. Should we just delete those? Is the general practice when I find them? Yeah, I did that today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right to the spam thing. Yeah. Oh, and then. Other thing I was going to say is just the amount of people who were so. Interested in the significant pre ordinance. I've talked to some of my neighbors over break. And had some more time at home. So I've been able to talk with a lot of people who would be supportive of a significant tree like ordinance. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I don't have email addresses or whatever. I don't have email addresses, but I have four names. Okay. So, you know, if we had a list of names and addresses, we could say, all right, this is going up to the town council. Can you write them or can you come to the meeting? Yeah, definitely. That's a good idea. Why don't you be in touch with Sarah about that? Okay. Yeah, I will. Sounds good. Great. That's it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Was a lot of trees seem to come down around town. A few weeks ago, but I wasn't sure if that was. If they were public trees or private trees. I drove by. Getting lunch at Cushman market. And I saw a big pine tree that had fallen. So I was just wondering if are these mostly public trees that are going or are they more private trees? I don't know. That kind of windstorm we had there where it was 60 degrees and went. Went down to minus 10. A matter of hours. That windstorm did blow down a significant. Number of large trees. Around town. Most of them were. All but one, I can say was we're actually private trees that blew down into the public way. We had a large leader blown out of it across the road. That was the only town tree, I think that actually failed. But once they fall in the road, we own it and we have to clean it up. They just removed the, the other half of it today. Or yesterday of that tree. The one on station road. Yep. I wonder why. We were supposed to do that removal. So that's interesting. It was, um, Northeast tree care or something. It's gone. Don't complain. Yeah. No, I think that's all the things I have. In general, when a tree does blow down due. In its own property. Should we offer the offer new trees to those. Residents as well. Yeah, I usually have that conversation with them. Not always, but most of the time, I mean, they come out and talk and want to know what's going on. And they either ask, can I have another tree to place, replace this one? Or, you know, I asked them if we'd be okay or not be okay, but would you like to have a tree planted? Occasionally they say no. Got it. Thank you. All right, Alan tree winds report. Yeah. So I guess the, uh, the big thing for me, I have a bunch of small items, but we, uh, as a member of the mass tree wardens and forest association, we had our annual conference this week, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Sturbridge. We had a record number of 450 attendees. So these are tree wardens, people in the tree care industry. It's utility companies. It's, uh, people from committees, anybody interested in, uh, public shade trees, uh, two-day conference. We had 50 students. We always invite, uh, agricultural programs, uh, tech schools, um, or public schools that have an arbor slash forestry program to attend. So we have 50 students also attend. A lot of great presentations. Uh, it's a really good, uh, really good day, two days. Um, uh, as far as a big takeaway from me, from the. Presentation, um, that the committee might be interested in is that, uh, uh, uh, virtually disease is in Massachusetts in a big way. Uh, we did find it in Amherst, uh, last month. Um, but it's already spread pretty significantly. Um, uh, it's very difficult to control spreads very rapidly, spreads very far. They believe it's spreading on birds. Um, so the takeaway from that presentation was that we're probably going to see a pretty significant decline. It's not loss of beach trees. Uh, and that's American, European, you know, Fernleaf Beach, you name it. Um, all of them. So all of our beach trees in town. Uh, we have them. Next day in this golf course is a row of beach trees, very old mature beach trees. Um, those are already infested with it. Um, so the beach trees on the common or next. Um, there is no real treatment for it. Um, there's nothing registered to treat it yet. So you actually have to get the chemical that you're treating the nematode. They live in the buds. They don't live in the wood or the sap or anywhere else. Um, and they do all their damage in the buds while the leaves are, you know, But it's growing and expanding as soon as they open up. The nematodes. Um, pretty much have already done all their damage. Um, you have a, you have an egg, a nymph and an adult all in the same. At the same time. So they're very difficult to treat the chemicals that. Are used to control nematodes and other things like turf and whatnot. Um, are very. Uh, whether refrigerators hot, they're very dangerous chemicals and they're dangerous to work with. Um, So. Not good news for our beach trees in town. And the last board also is just. Everywhere. Um, We're going to see significant dieback of ever. Of, um, Ash trees in town. The trees on Kinnock Park are infested. And, um, you know, all the trees that I look at now are pretty much already infested. So they're going to be gone in a matter of, you know, years. And white pine decline is still very active. And we're losing a lot of white pine just from multiple things going on white pine. So. Some. The other presentation they had from, uh, The nursery industry. Was that expect to cost the trees to go up. The industry is just, you know, overwhelmed with request for trees and they can't grow enough of them fast enough. So it's putting cost pressure. On the trees. They also can't get labor. So the nursery industry. On every step of it is struggling with finding people to help grow trees and get them, get them to harvest, uh, for planting. So, you know, we're struggling to find people to work. They're struggling. Everyone's struggling to find work. So the cost of trees will be. Continue to grow up. Regardless of all the other costs that are associated. With the inflation. Hold on a second, Alan. Yeah, Britt, good. Yeah, I just wanted to ask Alan if, um, based on the presentations, if you had a sense of what the expected timeframe is for that. Um, Cost increase for trees, you know, if it would be worth us considering buying more trees than usual upfront and trying to store them somewhere, you know, to avoid not being able to afford as many trees, you know, a few months from now for it, you're kind of expecting that to be longer term. So, um, I think, uh, you know, if you want to buy smaller trees, um, maybe buy bare root tree stock, um, the price is going to be immediate. You'll see an increase the spring as soon as nobody's selling trees right now. Um, so, you know, get your orders in early, um, just because of availability. Um, and then, uh, but the cost is pretty much already baked into what they're going to do and they don't see any change in the labor factor, um, or the demand, uh, for the near term. So it's going to go continue to be an issue for a couple of years unless, again, unless the economy totally tanks, um, which is what happened when we started our tree planting program back in 2000 and. 11 around there, 2012. That was at the very bottom of sort of the. Um, a little recession we had in 2008. And they were stuck with a lot of trees in their nurseries. They couldn't get rid of. So I was buying, you know, a two inch caliper, uh, grown bag tree for $85 that, that tree today is $185, $195. It's the same tree today. Um, that brings up the idea of starting our nursery again. And I would need someone, we need to find a spot on the spot that I had wasn't great and it's not really available anymore. So, you know, where could we have a nursery and we'd need someone to really take that on as a project. That's a great idea. I mean, it was great that we did that. We grew Turkish hazelnut trees, which, um, we were able to plant quite a few out, you know, maybe 12, 15 trees. And they cost us almost nothing to grow. So, yeah. Um, and then, uh, our bucket truck, uh, sprung a leak in the upper piste, the piston on the upper boom. Um, so it's actually been offline for, um, about four weeks now. Uh, can't get a new piston until April. Uh, so we're having the one that started leaking, uh, rebuilt. Um, we should have that back hopefully soon. Um, though I don't have a date for that yet. Um, we mulch the trees on the North common. If you notice that the trees around the Mary maple have all had very thick layer of mulch applied. Uh, that's all part of the root zone protection plan for the construction. And we'll be adding more to that, expanding out more, uh, in the future. But that's, those are going to be all no go in areas for, uh, construction projects. That should start still need to have the stump ground. Um, the, um, Henry mentioned the sustainability festival. I just want to make sure the committee was aware that that's coming back. Uh, for those of you who didn't know about it, committee participated in that, um, since this beginning, um, it's great opportunity to really see a lot of people. Um, Is that an Earth Day related event on the common? It is. Yep. So it's the 22nd Earth Day related. Um, Arbor Day is the last Friday of April. So April 28th, the following weekend is Arbor Day. We do Arbor month usually. Um, so we have a lot of planning to do. Which we kind of can fold hopefully into, um, The heritage tree grant and the sick mortuary at the Amherst History Museum. I'm sorry. Um, Alan, did they have a date? Did they have a date for the festival? Did they have a date ready for the festival? The sustainability festival. Yes. The 20, the 22nd. Okay. Thank you. April 22nd. So hopefully we can, uh, Combine Arbor month with some. Something that we have to come up with for the. Large maple. Uh, again, I want to try to. Get a speaker. Get a venue. I need to talk to. The immerse cinema to see if we can. Um, I think that's it. If you were to report. Any other questions for Alan? All right. So we go on to the merry maple. What's the story with getting that, uh, your presentation on the town website? Okay. It should be on the town website. Okay. Should be on the, um, Actually, you're the committee page. Um, we can link it to the committee page. Um, I don't think it was there. How is that today? Let me check. Also the, um, the last. Shaitree meeting where I gave the. The short PowerPoint presentation. Um, Is on your. Committees. Meeting. It's listed there. I guess we could take that and edit it down to just the. Just the segment of the merry maple. So people didn't have to watch the whole committee. Where would it be? Minutes. Oh, minutes. Okay. Yeah. Okay. That's there, but, um. Oh, it's the link to the thing in the minutes. Yep. Ah, okay. Okay. I'll look at that later. So Julian, can you find that link and then share it with the mayor? Julian, can you find that link and then share it with the Facebook and Instagram thing. For the article that was put out. For the, um, you know, the pro the. The presentation that Alan did with slides and talking that he did at our meeting. I can find it on the town website and put it up. Yeah. Great. Yeah. It should be on the minutes from our on our website. Great. That's great. All right. Good. Um, and then the wood giveaway. So I, I have all of the, I took the, um, Information brick gave me and went out and we cut all the wood rounds of various sizes, uh, some various lengths of wood that people wanted. Um, There's a few people that requested boards, which I can't do. And Henry, you were one of those people that requested a board. I can give you a log that you can make a board out of and find someone to mill it. Um, I'm working with, with somebody, um, To. Mill some of the trees or to come up with a way to make some benches out of the trees that will be in the town, part of the town bench inventory. Yeah. I'm looking for something to maybe make a bench by the bus stop on public road. So if you get some boards, otherwise I'll take a slab. Sure. Okay. Thanks. Well, I had that and, uh, I've written an email briefly today and we just need to come up with, um, A way to get everybody. I have started delivering it to people that I know and, um, They requested, you know, some odd pieces. Um, so I delivered those. Um, But, uh, as far as the wood rounds go that we people requested, I have a, they're all in the back of my truck. So. Okay. So. Ready to go. It's a little to be in your truck for a long time, but we could bring it to the sustainability festival and help you pick them up there. It might be an interesting thing to attract people to our booth. Or if we have unclaimed pieces, that might be a thing to do to have them there and give them out then. I'm happy. I mean, I don't. Having seen the list, I don't get the sense that it's a huge number of pieces. I'm happy to. You know, like put them in my shed or my barn and just. Say, hey, people can stop by between this hour and this hour on this weekend or this weekend. You know, that's helpful. That's great. Yeah. I don't know if you want to do that or I didn't know if the committee wanted to. Have an event that people can pick it up. And then again, who knows if someone's available at that time of day, you know, whatever. So yeah, I'm happy to do whatever the committee wants. Actually, the other idea that I had, and I just remember this. You know, there is the indoor farmers market at had in Hadley. Right now it's in the mall. Set up a table there and then it gets more people to that market. And I know it's many of the same vendors that come to the Amherst market. We could try that as well. I'd be happy to volunteer for a couple of hours to do that. I don't know if that's run by the town of Hadley. I don't know who actually it's not. You'd have to contact the winter market. Okay. You look up Amherst winter market and maybe I think it's still called that, but yeah. Contact people and we could do a booth, you know, have give out our flyers and information about our events too. Yeah. Yeah, something like that could work. Great. It's a nice market. I mean it's little, but yeah. Great. Anything else on the merry maple? I collected all of the. You know, letters to the merry maple. Right before Christmas, I actually have not looked through all of them. I looked through, you know, maybe. 20 or 30 of them and there were a lot of like this kids scribbling. And so I need to go through and see like what number. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Roughly of actual memories have been shared. And then maybe we can, I'll send an email and we can decide how we want to proceed. At that point, you know, if it's like three actual stories or memories or, you know, or if it's 98% kids saying, I love you tree and like that's all of it. I just want to make sure that there's enough information on, on those based on that information. We could maybe have. You know, a display at the Jones library if you contacted them. Yeah, I think that would be great. I think. Yeah. We have to go through them and make sure there's enough. Substance there to warrant that. Let's bring that back. Don't have the, I know people had also submitted. Memories and stories digitally. And I need to follow up with the. I think we can follow up with the. Whoever was running that to see if we can get those. Could we use any of them for social media posts? Or, you know, did people. When they submitted it. Agree that it could be shared. We didn't ask anyone for permission to share. But it was posted on the signs that were around the tables that there would likely be some type of public display. And it was a public event. So I would think like from a legal perspective. But yeah, okay. I think just one thing we think about at the museum is, you know, not including a child's last name or a photo of them without their permission or something like that. Sure. Yeah. And the ones that I've seen from kids so far, do not have last names and do not include photos. Good. Yeah, it'd be cute. Yeah. Some of them are cute. I mean, some of them are, are. You know, heartwarming actually. Like I love the merry maple and I'm, I'm sad that it has to die. And like just. But I'll go through the rest of those and yes, I think some of them could be used for social media at the very least. And, you know, maybe I'll make a few. I'll propose a few ideas based on what's there. Sounds good. Town tree inventory. Anything. We haven't done much on the tree inventory. I was hoping that the intern that worked this past summer was going to have some time during break to do it. We haven't been able to connect yet, but hopefully you can spend maybe four or five days working on it. The other part of the tree inventory grant that we got was the management plan. I did start working on the management plan. And I got a good outline together and starting to plug in the various components of that. So what I'd like to do is get that. You know, a little more completed and then give it to the committee to look at and, you know, see how you feel and what you think should be added to it. I think the committee should have a good voice in it. Because the committee, you know, will be one of those things that is continual, you know, long after I leave. So it would be nice to make sure that whatever happens. I think that the committee is involved. In the management of town streets. What's the name of that plan. The urban forest management plan. All right. Social media update. Julian. I don't have anything to report for that. Okay. Sean is not here. So we'll move on. Yeah. I think we had before this meeting last night, I think. Shashana posted the meeting on Facebook too. So. In fact, that's how I found that the meeting wasn't happening Tuesday. Cause I had sent out the agenda and forgot to check to see. And then Shashana said, I went to post it on Facebook and I couldn't find the link. Oh, okay. Okay. Thank you so much for. Ellen. We met once and anything new on that to say. Yeah. Well, we had talked about possibly. Doing the tree tour again. The spring. Maybe on Mother's Day as well. Since we had a nice turnout last year on that date, I was a little skeptical, but it worked out really well. Okay. So. Henry and I talked about. The options for sharing the information, whether the information, the photographs and write ups go into an app or a QR code, or we do a printed brochure. I think it could definitely go up on the town website. If we sort of get an opportunity to. You know, I think it would be interesting and accessible. And I was going to, I'm going to do sort of a mockup if we want to do a printed brochure. Again. My feeling is to go more digital just because then we're not using paper, which is killing trees. So. That's, I think where. I think that's where we're going to go. We're going to go down. It was the sugar maple on Dickinson. It was on a private property. So we lost a tree. Sadly. That was the only sugar maple on our tour, but there is one other. It's not as nice, but on Dickinson. So maybe we'll do that. So yeah, we did talk about the idea of an app. I don't know if I'm creating an app, but I checked with. Gordon who used to be on the committee and he didn't know anything about it either, but that's something if anyone knows anyone who creates apps or has an idea about how to do that. That'd be a really great thing to have an app that, you know, we offer for free and people put it on their phone and then do the tour on their own. I think it's the easiest way to get the information out. Yeah, there are definitely students at UMass who could put something like that together either for credit or for payment. Which if it's an undergrad is not, you know, I don't think it would take that many hours, perhaps a few hundred dollars. And I feel like there are other options to like a, you know, there's a whole GIS program spanning the two departments that I'm in where, you know, you know, people could make what's called an ArcGIS story map where you would, you could have a QR code, they would log on to it and you can kind of like walk through with these geolocated pin points with information about each tree and that kind of thing. So if that's something we wanted to do, I could put out a call for either an undergraduate student or a graduate student to enroll in an independent study with me. And I could guide them on that and they would receive credit. So that's exactly what I want. Yeah. Okay. All right. So maybe I'll, I'll think about how to go about that. I guess the other thing I was going to bring up at some point, as I had mentioned previously to the committee that I teach an environmental education class in the spring. Every year I'd like for there to be a community component to it. And so I think I'm decided upon having that community component focused on trees for this semester, which means I'll have 25 undergraduate and graduate students who will need to be working on some type of collaborative project. You know, bringing a range of skills onto the scene. And so that could, I mean, in looking at the agenda here, I'm thinking like, okay, well, they could probably help with the town tree tour in different ways. They could help with, you know, different things. They could help with the sustainability fair event. So, you know, I'd be interested to hear from the committee, perhaps not now, but at some point, what would be the most useful thing? Would it be like a large event, you know, let different groups contribute in different ways, right? The key is just that it's a something where they're actively designing and participating in what could be considered environmental education on trees. At the community scale. And that's obviously very open-ended. So I'm, I'm pretty flexible in terms of what I'm willing to have them do and what I think they would be interested in. And so maybe just hearing at some point about what you all think the, the largest need would be, be useful. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, that's a great opportunity. Yeah, pursue that. And we'll put on the agenda for February to have a longer discussion. Okay. Good. Thanks. When do you need to have your, you know, class schedule written up and the outline and everything. Yeah, so the syllabus, the class will start on February 6. I believe that's the first day of fall class, sorry, spring classes. And so what I've done in past years is kind of spend the, I give them a heads up at the beginning of the semester that they'll be some kind of collaborative project on a particular theme. And then we spend the first couple of weeks of the semester just kind of learning the basics about environmental education and different tools and that kind of thing. And so they don't actually get into the meat of the project until. I mean, really until late February, I guess I was going to say March, but late February is probably better. So certainly if we would decide it on, I think that would be helpful. Okay. All right. Good. So. Where are we second Saturday plantings? Did. Did people come up with. Sites. I had one in mind and I can't remember what it is. No. I did. Let me see if I can pull up. See if I can. I have a map. Sorry, I'm having difficulty here. Not voting well. I think there's a need along main street. A bunch of trees are taken down. I think, you know, sort of near Amherst dental. Along there. There's a lot of pedestrian traffic and bus stop. And you can see tree stumps. But there are no, you know, there's a big swath of land there with no trees along the road. Main street is a very narrow planting area. That's in the public way. So any tree planting we do a main street will be a setback. But that's okay. I'm more than happy to work with the property owners there to. Okay. It's mostly rental units, I think in that area, but, you know, I noticed this summer there's just like blasting sunlight into the, all the side of the apartment buildings. So that was my recommendation. And there's a lot of student housing there, but there's also a lot of just like family rental units and affordable housing. So it might be a good place to target. Yeah, there's certainly a lot of, you know, pedestrian. And bike traffic along there too. So. True. Can you guys see my screen? Yes. Yeah. It looks way more formal than it actually is. These are not pinpointed spots, but having drip, this is, um, this is kind of, an East Amherst near the, um, There's the Cumbie there and there's the spirit house over here. Two places that are near and dear to my heart. Um, the. These, these spots here, like, I don't, you know, this is, this is a question like it would take Alan. You may know offhand, but it would. If you don't, it would take you going by and saying, well, these are not public way. We could, there's no way we could do it, but this, this spot here in particular is like, I feel like there's a. There are spaces for trees there, whether we could plant there or not. I don't know, but it seems like an ample space. And some of these others. Sorry. We cannot see them. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Um, yeah. That would be important. Anyway, the top, basically the, the top red dot is one that it's kind of a prom spot, I think for that. And there are others. Like I just don't know what's, you know, like this is a place where a lot of, like a lot of people enter. Town through this, um, through this road, um, on the way to work or coming back to school or whatever. East Amherst Village Center. Yeah, there we go. East Amherst Village Center. Um, so I don't know. I mean, I think. Ideally we, we would have enough open spots there to plant some trees. I just, the big question is. Public versus private. So, um, that's my submission and I will stop screen sharing now. That's a, it's a great idea. Um, and I look at that every day. And I'm just been waiting and waiting for the development that's now scheduled to happen there. So three of those locations are now under. Uh, They're going to be developed. Um, and they are, it isn't mostly setback plantings for Belch 10 road. They're also going to be putting a sidewalk, a new sidewalk on both sides. Belch 10 road and doing some road widening. Well, all the way from. Um, Uh, Cumberlands, Cumberfarm down to the bridge. So it's, it's all going to get torn up and, you know, So probably not a 2023 thing for us. Yeah. So it's going to be something we're going to need to come in after. Um, And do a lot of setback plantings. But I agree. It's, it's. It's a blighted area where everyone drives into town. It continues as you go up college street. College street has big gaps, especially by that, uh, you know, substation utility substation. So I would love to see some stuff going in there. That's also getting new sidewalks. Um, And some road work done. Right. Go ahead. Um, no, that's great. Uh, I just had one question. What about the Watson farms? Uh, housing area. I'm not sure is that town owned or is that, owned by a developer who we would need to get in touch with? What are the possibilities of planting there? Where is the Watson farm? Uh, it's off main street. Um, Oh, like go past some way and in, uh, in between Maine and caught in college street. So are you talking about main street or college street? Is that the name of the, is that the name of the road Watson farms? Watson farms is the name of the apartment complex. I'm not even, I don't think I've ever heard that name. Sorry. I apologize. It's probably private property. Is it on main street Julian or is it on college street? The entrance. The entrance is on main. Okay. And it says it's owned by the Emerson housing authority. Oh, that's called. Really? Yeah. I just need Alpine something or 693 main street. Yeah, there's a Amherst housing authority has a project there. Yes. Not Aspen chase. That's totally different. That's different. Cross from Salem place. Right next to the bus stop underneath power lines. Yeah. High tension lines there. Yeah, so there is definitely as an opportunity there. You got to watch about, you got to watch high tension lines. As far as going into the complex, I'm not sure about that. Okay, got it. Thank you. Any other ideas? I have Dana. Blue Hills and faring street again. Dana and Blue Hills are losing a lot of their sugar maples. And I have to take more down, unfortunately. And they would like trees. Faring street needs trees. There's going to be a lot of setback planting there, but they need trees as well. Okay. Definitely had neighbors on orchard who thought some of the trees on Woodside were going to go to orchard and were sad when they didn't say lost a bunch of sugar maples. But again, there's the question of, you know, is that a neighborhood where people could just plant their own trees? I don't know. I don't know. It is a lot of those houses. I mean, they're all Amherst college faculty except for one, but many of them are rental rented. I'd like to replant on orchard. You know, we just didn't have enough. Opportunity when we were planting to do it. Enough people in time resources. So I would like to add that in for next year. Well, if we can get, you know, three of these, we've got five or six ideas here, three or four of them to work. And then we do tree care the other months. That should be good. That would be a good season. Good. Anything else on the tree plantings? No, keep looking for spots. And there's probably more spots we could come up with too. So. All right. So next is the history museum. Yeah. So I cut their round wood round with Mary maple. So they're going to have one that's going to go into the history museum. Is that part of their. Part of their displays. I do need to reach out to them. I have been. Developing some ideas. I do have the. Specification written out to go out to bid to get the tree work done that needs to be done on the. The sycamore tree. So I can, I can roll that out probably in February. Or before. To get those kids back. But yeah, I need to reach out to them. Okay. Get the ball rolling. Is the, the tree that's there. Is that an American sycamore? Yes. Okay. So if we plant a bride tree, I think. I think that's a good idea. We shouldn't do inter species marriage there. We might want to get a pure American sycamore. And it's away from the road. It should be. Should be doable. Yeah, I don't have a problem planting a native. Yeah. So. And that, you know, we should. At some point, I guess when, whatever we plan to some event. Maybe the planting of that tree could be part of that. I hope, I hope, I hope it is. Good. Okay. Other ideas about that. Yeah. All right. Town budget line item. Reaching out to the town council. Yeah, I have it and I will. Okay. That's good. And Julian already mentioned a little bit about the significant tree ordinance. Yeah. So, you know, people want to write writing a letter to the editor or let it to the editor about this. About the significant tree ordinance. About any tree related issues. I think. Getting our names in the paper, you know. So-and-so member of the Emirates public tree committee or signed by all of us. As the public tree committee. So. I haven't been writing at all, but I keep thinking about it. But if people want to write. Anyone on the committee should really do that. That's a good thing to do. I brought this up to the Emirates climate justice alliance, which is a group in town. And they said that they would push forward as well. So. Great. Okay. Good. All right. Old items. Connection with Stockbridge school. We talked about that last month. I forget what we said, though. I don't remember what we said. I think it's not the Stockbridge school that we need to connect with, but I had a message into Christina. Yes. And, you know, they're very receptive to having us come speak in their classes and. You know, I teach in the same classroom as, as these folks and. So. Yeah, I'm not sure what the best pathway forward there is, to do. To have students at the same time. To have teachers for planting events or for specific projects. Especially this spring. You know, that's an opportunity for us to reach out to Christina and her students. Okay. And I'd love to speak to their classes. Okay. I do have something to add to that. So every spring I do a tree. I do it. walk from Kenrick Park, we talked about, you know, the various development that's happened there and the tree issues and then we walk kind of down North Pleasant Street towards the common and we end up, you just go into the parking garage and talk about, you know, challenges over there. And then we end up on the common and we talk about, you know, how the common gets a lot of soil compaction and things like that and then the class ends. And so I've been doing that for too many years. And this year we decided to break it up a bit and we were going to ask a member of the committee or members of the committee to join us on Kenrick Park and talk about the role of the committee in, you know, in Amherst and what you do as far as volunteer tree planting and public education and outreach and stuff like that. So the date, the date is, I wrote it down. The 5th of April. April 5th, okay. What time? It's usually in, I think it's usually around 11 o'clock or so midday, it's midday usually, I think. 10, 11, I have to get the time. Okay. Is it usually a weekday or a weekend? It's usually a weekday, yeah. It's a class. So they have a class and they all, they go out and meet on Kenrick Park during their, you know, hour long class or wherever it is, or a lab. We discuss urban forestry. If I can get permission from my teacher at that time, I would certainly be up for it. Okay, great. And I'm happy to do that. Yeah. Britt, what's the name of the program we're actually trying to connect with instead of Stockbridge School? It's, let's see, it's the UMass, it's the Forestry and Arboriculture, Boriculture program. That's within the Department of Environmental Conservation, which is separate from Stockbridge. That's, both are within the College of Natural Sciences, but Stockbridge is its own school. Okay, yeah. Okay, great. All right, North Hampton Road, anything new there? Nothing new, Mayan. Library trees. I did tell Sarah about a meeting that was coming up of the library board. I was gonna talk some about design. I don't know if she went, but we'll table that. Website updates, Mr. Bennett. Sorry, no. Complete streets. I've done nothing on that. I have an update on complete streets. Okay. So at our November, December board meeting of the Tree Wardens, they, the head architect, landscape designer for Mass DOT, who is a large member, joined us and said that they received a lot of questions and concerns over their tree component of complete streets and they are going to be sending out a survey to all communities to see how trees should play in complete streets, the role of trees should play in complete streets. So they get, which this means they got some pretty serious pushback over the years and they're looking at their tree, how they use trees in complete streets. So I think that's pretty big progress. And that was the goal of all of the outreach that we were doing was to try to get them to take trees more seriously during road crashes. So I think that's great news. That is great. Okay. Yeah, let us know when the survey comes out or how we can get all of us to respond to it. Yeah, good. That is good. All right. Significant tree ordinance. Again, Sarah's not here. There's probably no particular news yet. I haven't done anything on it. Okay. The solar bylaw group, Julian. Are you there, Julian? I'll take that for now. He's still on. All right. Anything else? Committee comments. Topics not interested by the chair. We talked about that one, which is whether we can plant when people request trees. So I'll keep pursuing that. There you are. Any news from the solar bylaw group? Yeah. Sorry about that. And, you know, if you can't hear me because I'm at a sports game, but basically I went to their meeting and they had the fire department and they had two folks from the fire department there who talked all about what, who talked all about what, who talked about what to do with the battery storage systems and how that would affect like the potential for a forest fire or an explosion or something like that. But they didn't really go into much with deforestation or anything like that. Thank you. All right. Anything else? I just hope you guys have been able to hear me. I know it's very loud in my background. I apologize. We heard that. I heard that. If I heard that, most people probably heard it. So that's good. Yeah, all right. So next month, I will make sure that the meeting gets posted on time. I send out the thing and it's always gone. So I didn't think about it, but I will double check back if I don't hear right away from Amber from the town about that. That's probably my email is a mess. Sometimes emails go out. Sometimes they don't go out. Sometimes they come in. Sometimes they don't come in. Sometimes they come in five days after someone sent it to me. I usually get responses to people's emails before I get the actual email. But anyway, I'll have to do a spam filters and everything, but that's just my little rant. I'll stop now. Thank you, everyone. Looking forward to when we can plant, huh? Yeah. Indeed. All right, good. Thanks again. And yeah, Benny, you'll get the minutes out and everyone will do all the things they promised to do this month, right? Yep. Happy New Year. Happy New Year. All right, thanks. Thanks everybody. Bye. Bye-bye.