 Hi, Alan. Yeah, you make me host. Workout. I don't see your. Names now popping up at the moment. There it is. Just refreshed. Should be good to go. Okay. We'll see a masses joining. Lindsay. There's a bunch of people. No people from the committee. I'll be right back. I'll be right back. Almost ready to start. All right. I think we're getting close. People in the committee can at least turn on their. Video. Yeah. I don't know where it is. It's here. All right, Sarah's. Nobody gets the links. What's going on. On the website. Be right back. Almost ready to start. All right. I think we're getting close. Okay. Video. Okay. I think we're all here. Shashana is not going to be able to make it. So. Julie and you're flashing. We lost Julian, but we guys, he's still here. So we have a couple of people attending who chose not to be. Promoted. Catherine Dickey, Lindsay Robinson. And then. We also have one other person. If I can find her name. You see a Massey. So those three are students in my environmental education class, and they may have. A question at some point later about the tree inventory and how to be helpful on that. And I said they could have extra credit for attending a public meeting. So if you all Lindsay, Catherine or Lucia have any. Comments or anything, just let Henry know. At whatever point he prompts. Members of the public to speak. You can speak up or you can raise your hand. I'm going to, I don't have my folder with me. I'm just going to go around and get it and then we'll officially start. Right. Bennett, you're taking minutes. And Sarah, can you, if I make you host, can you keep an eye on attendees and add anybody in? Yes. I can find you here. Maybe Alan, you'll have to do that. Promote Sarah to host and I'll grab my agenda. I'm not going to. Share the agenda. And the minutes. Cause that was more complicated than it was worth it seemed. All right. So. Welcome everybody. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And do we approve the April minutes? No one favor. I wasn't there. Okay. Julian. Can you hear us? If you unmute, we can hear you. Maybe, maybe you can't hear us. Can you hear me? Yes. Yes. Right. My. Has some sort of issue. Yes. I approve the minutes. I'm going to join on a different device here. Okay. That's good. Okay. Okay. That's good. Announcements and public comments. Any of the three students or anybody else on want to make a comment. Talk about yourself or your wonderful teacher or anything else. Catherine, go ahead. Hey, hi. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, perfect. So we're working on a tree project for the Amherst farmers market this Saturday. And our group, which is also my group and our focus is on past, present, and future. And so one of the tools that we were using when we were creating our project was the Amherst tree database. But then I'm really talked about in class how. It's like a little bit over 10 years old. And so part of our project, we are thinking about. Inviting people at the farmers market. So we were just wondering what the best way to collect that data would be, whether it to be an email or if we just start like a Google form in a spreadsheet. And then I was also wondering about the. Amherst tree map. And I know there's a GIS layer, but I wasn't sure if you also had. Like an Excel table or a data set. That's also available to the public. And just, if you had any ideas. On like community science approaches to updating the database. I can try to answer that. I'm Alan Snow. I'm the. Pre-warden with the town. Welcome to the Shaitree meeting. Thanks for all your work you're doing on. You know, making helping to make people aware. Very important. So our database, the tree inventory. Is downloadable. You know, you can download the entire. Inventory as an Excel spreadsheet or something similar. From the. Website. I'm pretty sure. If not, I can make that happen. So that would give you. You know, pretty much everything we have collected. And one big. Excel spreadsheet. So that's possible. I can also give you. Just a sample of the data that we collect. As well. Our inventory. Actually is a, you know, it's a living. Document inventory. So we update it on a daily basis. So. When we plant a tree. In theory, we add the tree. When we take the tree down in there, we take. The tree. We market as either. Removed. Which means that everything is gone. Including the stump or a stump. Or. It's a tree. So it goes from being a. A live tree to being a stump to being removed. Which. Leaves the data there. There's a symbol for the. Old tree. At that location with all the data. But it's not something that's actually active. Maintain the data, which is nice. And then we can plant, you know, add new points. As we plant new trees in that location. I'm sure that answered all your questions. No, yes, that did. Thank you. Then. I guess I was just going to ask. So when we say, like, when we've been going back. To old items on our agenda every month. And one of them is tree inventory. What is the work that needs to be done then with updating the tree inventory? And I may have given a false impression maybe to the students that. That there needed to be a lot of updating. Cause I had just kind of pulled it up on my street. And I was like. And I thought, okay, there's like, there's a lot of updating with years of backlog that needs to happen. So from an updating perspective, what, what would be helpful? Great. So, yeah. So we're human. And we often don't have the. Tablet with us or something. You know, we're doing our moogle's and we just don't keep up with what's happening. And so. I'm not sure. There's a number of trees out there that we have not removed from the database. We try to catch them as we, you know, go through the process of grinding the stump and everything. There's another opportunity to. You know, catch that tree has been removed. So the part that needs updating is part of the trees that have been removed. And we didn't. You know, Log them in. Or any newly planted trees. Or any new trees that have been removed. We didn't, you know, Log them in. Or any newly planted trees that we added, but we didn't put in the inventory. But specifically the tree data itself. So, you know, you've got this, you know, 60 year old. Sugar maple tree. In front of your house, which is now. You know, 13 years older. So, you know, It's condition could have changed. It could be sort of being. Three quarters alive. It could be half dead. It could have, you know, French failure or some kind of decay. So all these data points that we collected. Percent can't be things like that. Might change. Over 10 year period. So what we want to do is. Revisit. Catch everything we missed and then update the health of the tree. That condition is really important to keep track. There's also, there could be some mistakes in there. And there are a few, some streets that aren't done, right? Yes. And so we were also going to. Expand the coverage of the inventory right now. We're only at about 60%. So. So would it be helpful then if you, for example, Catherine's group. If you want to make people aware of the town tree inventory. Share a link to it and then prompt people and say, Hey, go back to your street. Take a look at the trees that are there. And report back on. Conditions or like what information in terms of reporting back would be helpful. Yeah. So I mean, it's, it's nice to know if a tree isn't there anymore. I mean, that's pretty good information. It's difficult. You know, to get like. You know, leaf condition and decay and some of the other things that we want to collect does take a bit of a train die. To do. So definitely get something to say, you know. This tree. Is no longer there or the tree is dead. They could report that. They could report also that they on their own. You know, planted a new tree in front of the yard that's in the front of the yard. I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing. I think that as well. Kind of mentioned, so the citizen scientist kind of way. You know, it's, it's great to have a lot of eyes out there. It's great for education. But we can't. We have to be careful what we try to ask them to collect. Okay. I think that works. So, so just kind of basic comparing, you know, if there are trees on the inventory on their street, that are no longer there. And then the last question. That I have is would it then be appropriate for them to mail, to email that information to the shade tree committee, or do you prefer that they send that to, to me directly? And I can kind of. Collect, you know, collect everything and then report back. It'd be nice if you had like a timeline. So, you know, can you report back in. You know, like. Five days. Something like that. And have everything come in and have it all be compiled into one document, which could then be sent to me or something like that. Okay. Great. So, so Catherine and Lucia, we'll follow up on that. And yeah, if anyone else has other questions, please go ahead. Awesome. Thank you so much. Henry, you're muted. Looks like you were trying to talk. Sorry, I muted. Julian. All right. You had your hand raised. Yep. Sorry. I am now entered and you can see me on the screen. Okay. I wanted to just add to what Alan said that. I think it'd be best to went to you, Britt. And then you collated. It doesn't have to go to the whole committee, but the general results you're finding that would be interesting for the committee. And the reason it's on the ongoing agenda. And the old items is originally there was supposed to be a training where people on the committee and other volunteers were going to get trained and that never happened. And still could happen, I suppose. So. Got it. Okay. So maybe we could also then prompt people. If we're looking for a citizen, like residents to also be trained, maybe that's something that we can share, you know, to send me their email if they are interested in being on the list. To be trained as a volunteer to update this tree inventory. So that's a way for us to collect volunteers also. Yeah. Does that work for you, Alan? That sounds like good idea. Great. Great. Okay. So let's move on. Volunteer hours. I had about 15 hours this month. Great. I wasn't here last month and I, so I didn't report. So let's say. Probably eight hours this month and. Five hours last month. Okay, Sarah. Five. Bennett. Muted Bennett. Hours. Yes. Well, yes. Sorry. It's like I'm learning it anew. Yeah, Alan. Five. Okay. Julian. Well. Well. And the rear fallen to help with the last, the last planting was before our last meeting. We haven't had a planting since our last meeting, I think. Okay. All right. Good. Let's move on to the agenda of the chairs report. I sent out an email earlier today that. We got a request to join a volunteer fair and Amherst. Where groups that need volunteers can have a booth and. Anyway, I'm not going to be around this Friday from 10 to noon. Is there anybody that would be able to be there? No. Okay. So yeah, it's a difficult time, but. What time was that? Where, when, where was it? It's a, I don't have the sheet in front of me, but it's. Somewhere in town from 10 to 12, maybe the bank center. I can check. It's Friday on the common. On the common. Yeah. From 10 to noon. What date Friday, the. Well, Friday. Oh, this Friday. Short notice. And also in the middle of the day on a Friday. I know. People work. Yeah. So anyway. Maybe your students can skip school that day and. If they weren't preparing for their, their, their big project on set. And all their final exams. All right. Other things I have. Let's see. Oh, I sent a thank you card at Alan's suggestion to. The guy who spoke at the Emerson college event. Was a really fun talk. So I was happy to do that. I think that's really all I have. I'm not going to be here for the planting, but. I'm healthy and I'm going to stay on the committee and. So that's good news. So yeah. All right. One other thing is if you don't make a meeting, please do send your hours in. And, and let us know ahead of time if you can. So. All right, vice chair report Julian. Yeah, so I. Have emailed the, or actually emailed back. I'm going to send a message to the president. And I'm going to send a message to the president. More keen who runs the Emerson need. And I told her to put our plantings on their events calendar. And I also have. Just continue to monitor that email. We've gotten a few requests. One from Phyllis Leher. And she will put the. The. Where she writes for them and she will add our committees. Plantings and the time it is in there. And then I believe that is it. So more outreach and social media and anything. Okay. There were a couple of people who wrote in today or yesterday saying they would like to help this weekend. So. Yes. We'll get some help. Yeah. Yeah. We'll get some help. And a few of them have said that they'll. That's great. I won't be there, but hopefully they won't. Yeah. Okay. Three warden report. Thank you, Julian. Yeah. We've been starting to water again at the rain has. Stopped. So I didn't warm up a little bit. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. We water Dana Lincoln. Sorry, Dana and Amity and blue Hills. We're also watering the cherry tree that we transplanted on the North Amherst Common. It seems to be doing okay. That's the one that we bear rooted. Using the air spade and transplanted it. But. True to her feet down on the common. Into a new location. So it's nice to see that's doing well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So they finished one side of the sidewalks on Canada. And we worked with the contractor to protect the tree roots. And it was my opinion, very successful. Good contractor to work with. We laid down some. Heat barrier around the trunk flares where they would go down the road. And they would go down the road. Some on degrees doesn't physically. Burn the. Camium of the trees. So. That will stay there and eventually sort of decompose. But. I'm very pleased with the first side being done at least. They're going to start the other side of the catalog. Probably next week sometime. Then there's a section from North pleasant street to sort of the parking garage entrance on Kellogg. A different contractor is going to be doing. That's the section where we're going to be using. Hopefully the perky paved rubberized forest surface around the trunks instead of asphalt. So that'll be interesting. And then we still have to do some, a lot of crown reduction and cleaning on those two trees. They're the ones that. They're the ones that we're going to be using. We're exhibiting. Some decay that we need to be mindful of. And we'll reduce the. The heavy branches so they don't. Fail. In wind. So we're working on that. I said the site visit the. Tree city USA awards ceremony with DCR is going to be in June. June 6th. They haven't sent out the invitation yet or the location, but they just want to give her a heads up. That's June 6th at nine 30. Greenfield. So I'll follow up with more information. As soon as we. Get it. Generally we tried to get somebody from the community to go and I usually try to get somebody. You know, from. Town hall. You know, So they can see, you know, what's going on. As far as trees. And communities and Massachusetts. I would be happy to go to that if other committee members are not interested. So I'll let you know. When that's going to be. Or where. You know, I'm not going to be sharing. You didn't find out that apparently. I didn't successfully post the tree hearing on the town calendar. So I posted the paper. I posted on the tree. But it didn't get posted in the town calendar. And it requires two. Places of postings. Public places. For two weeks. So. We're going to try it again. In a few weeks. We're going to get the tree. And I will be back in about two weeks. When I get it. And I will repost that. Update on grants. Just quickly. The heritage tree grant with the embers. History museum. Hopefully that work will take place. Late this week early next week. Get that done. And I can. Send in all the. Reimbursed information for that grant. and the management plan, we had some issues with the data. I had an hour meeting today with our GIS department trying to figure out what's going on. I think we figured it out. So we run from 100 tree points that have been updated to over 500 tree points that have been updated. So I feel much better that we're not losing data, but we still have a ways to go. And I honestly don't know how I'm gonna make that happen. We were supposed to have a volunteer trading session and the person that was gonna, we were gonna do that with for various reasons, kept having to cancel and I had to cancel and we couldn't make our times coordinate and it never happened. So I got to talk to DCR about seeing if we can get an extension of that grant. They don't like doing that. So I'll see what we can do. The majors have to reapply for a grant later on or something to update. We haven't, it's a reimbursement grant. So we haven't, other than payroll, we haven't spent any unusual funds for this. Is there any way we can help or it's really just has to be something you do? Yeah, if we had successfully trained everybody in how to collect the data and to look at the various points that we're trying to collect, then that would be great. But it does require to send live crown and things that's not that complicated but it doesn't take the training of the eye which can be done in a couple of hours with a good trainer. So we'll work on it. Alan, I'll just mention and I don't wanna speak for Catherine, but Catherine had told me she has GIS skills and that she might be interested in volunteering to help do some updating and GIS stuff around the inventory at some point. So Catherine, if you're still interested in that we can talk and I connect you with Alan. Yeah, she's looking for jobs this summer. A way to get you credit for it. I can get you credit for it over the summer too. So I just wanna make that connection. Thank you. Yeah, I'd definitely be interested in that. So anyway, and like just for volunteer hours too. Like I'm on the database right now and I also have like some questions about the way data is because for status some of them have numbers instead of labels. And so, yeah, I just have a lot of GIS questions. So that's the public facing webpage that you're looking at. The one I could give you access to is much more detailed and shows you all the data that we collect. It'd be easy to do. So I can send you a sample of that. Great, if you wanna exchange emails or something, we can work on that. Great, thank you. I think that's it for updates. Okay, thanks. Sarah, Treasurer's report. Yes. So our current balance is $10,868.29. Henry, that $25 deposit went through and the deductions have all been for our tree plantings and the seedlings that we bought for the Arbor Day handouts. Can you send a thank you note? Nope. I wish Shashana gonna do that, I thought. Maybe it was Shashana. I'll check in with her about that. Okay, great, thank you. You're welcome. Social media website report. Julian? I will say that if you're looking at the website, I haven't done a thing about the website. Okay. I had been thinking, I don't know if Julian's listening, but I had been thinking a little bit about the Instagram and Julian, I know you're probably super busy. If I can be helpful with that in making more regular posts, I would be happy to. Or if you wanna give me access to that in some way, I would be happy to get that a little bit more active, posting like when we're planting and when we're doing events and things like that, just to, and then trying to get more people to sign up for that list as well, or whatever you call it per Instagram, follow, I guess. Well, yeah, that'd be great for that end for Facebook. Facebook, I can't do, I don't do. I haven't been on Facebook for a long time. I'm not very up on how that works. So Instagram, yeah. But I'll be happy to do the Instagram stuff, yeah. I think we're not quite getting the word out. We did get a good response to our email about people contacting town hall, but in general, we're not getting big response to our other requests for volunteers and this and that. So yeah, that'd be great. All right, I'll keep us posted on that. And next on the agenda is the presentations and discussion, Mary Maple Love Letter exhibit. Anything have happened with that? Well, so I wanted to ask the opinion of the committee. So for this tree event that the students in the environmental education class that I teach are putting on on Saturday, they are, for one of the groups, they are using the leftover cookies, leftover rounds from the Mary Maple and they'll be inviting people to paint on them and then making this sculpture out of them. And so that's the station, oh, no, that's not the station where they're talking about past, present, future. That's a different station, but one of the kind of themes throughout the stuff that they've put together is past, present and future of trees and amherst. And so if you all think it would be appropriate, I think we could display some of the letters as part of that, but I am also happy to keep it separate and maybe move forward this summer talking with the Jones Library. So I have no preference, but I would be interested. I don't wanna take the letters that we collected and put them into the student event if people are not comfortable with that. It is public, but I could also see a way of putting them on display at the Jones and I would be happy to actually take action on that. How many letters do you currently have? I counted them, I can't remember. I wanna say it's like, let's say there are maybe 50 that are not just actual scribbles, children. They are mostly from children. Some of them you can't read very well, a lot of them are just pictures, but the general flavor of the rest of them are young children writing, I'm sad to see the tree go, I will miss the tree, I don't understand why it has to come down, things like that. There were literally a few written by adults, so it is mostly kids. And actually I never got my hands on the digital submissions that the, I think it was the bid that they were collecting those, somebody was collecting those. So I should reach out and find out because that would be more likely to be stories from adults. So I guess in kind of talking about this myself, it maybe it makes sense to pick a few of the kid ones and see if we could do a display at the Jones Library this summer. I think it might make sense for the children's section of the library. I don't know if there's a place to put that. Yeah. I would just want it to not just be really sad though, like if they are really sad though. I know, but I'm wondering if we could pull a selection of really beautiful picture books about trees, to go with it or maybe solicit some that are more like, we could still open it up, but solicit some that are more like happy memories or family tradition. So it's not just a process. Yeah, that's an idea. And I wrote down the name of one of the librarians who had pulled all these great tree books for the Arbor Day reading. So maybe, I think she works in the children's area, Celeste. So maybe I'll chat with her about ideas for some type of tree related exhibit. And I'll go through them again and see if there aren't, if there are some that are uplifting instead of really, really, really sad. My neighbor said that she used to get drunk in the tree in the 80s as a teen. See, why don't they write, nobody wrote that. Yeah, we need like, I'd love like, I mean, it's sweet to have just children's letters. I think that makes it really nice, but maybe it could include adult letters too, but yeah. And there are a few, I just, let me go through them and let me see if I can connect with whoever collected if people were sharing digital memories. I mean, I have to say the most, one of the most interesting parts of the whole experience was having the wood in my shed and handing it out to people because when they came, they shared all these stories about the tree. And a lot of them were older folks who'd been around this tree or grown up around this tree for many decades. And it's a shame that those didn't get written down, but I will make myself an action item list and connect with the folks at the library as well and see what we can come up with and report back at the next meeting. All right, I have an idea. I mean, one is you have the email addresses of people who wanted tree pieces. Maybe you could write and ask them to write those stories. That's true. But the other idea is to use this as sort of a bigger exhibit. So this would be a part of an exhibit and because we do have to lose trees and we do authorize trees being cut down, but because people are sad by that, we are planting new trees and then have some photos of our planting and something like that. Yeah, and that's kind of what this, my students have been working on is this like past, present and future and this idea of witness trees, but also of like ghost trees, trees that are not there anymore. And they've pulled some imagery, I think from the historical society in other places, but yeah, I think that's an interesting idea. It could be cool to look into grant opportunities around like the, I don't remember what it stands for, but there's the Northeast Council for the Arts, I think. Is there something we could do creatively around these stories of trees? I think the Amherst Cultural Council is a perfect place to apply. They usually, if I recall, do like 1500 to 2000. Okay. Grants, but I would think if we can find a good location and sort of a good narrative. Yeah. Like this, it just seems like a perfect fit to me. Yeah. They may also offer some grant opportunities as well, but I think the cultural council is more likely. Okay, I would agree. Yeah, I think that's a really good idea. The other thing I will say is, although nobody that I know of at least does that anymore, Bennett, but we could have an exhibit similarly placed to where the tree was cut down on the New Common, where maybe there's like a little screen or a little bench or something that has the placards inside of it, that has the things that have been written inside of it covered up by like a placard or a plate of glass or something like that, where people can see that's where the tree was right when they're on the Common. I wonder if anybody's making a bench out of the tree. Yeah, what's the bench update, Alan? Is there a bench update? There is no update on the bench. We still have the wood for the bench, but we don't have it. Oh, you do? Yeah. That would be perfect. We're trying to figure out how to do it. I do have that one guy that we met at the Sustainability Fair, and he emailed me and he wanted to pick up some wood. I don't have any wood of an appropriate size for him. So let me connect you. The other thing I want to mention, I mentioned the sculpture that my students are hoping to have the community collaborate on made out of the Mary Maplewood. So that could be, maybe that becomes part of this, right? Like maybe there's, I don't know, maybe we, it can't be fixed outside, right? Because it's Norway Maplewood, but maybe temporarily, we have some kind of exhibit with these letters, with some of these other things that we've been talking about that we seek funding for as a community event of some kind. So I'll give this some thought. I'll do some digging and report back. Great, thank you. I was just going to add, Brett, while we were on the topic, if you're going to reach out to the people who took wood, you could see if they'll send you photos of what they've made, because that's a form of a love letter to the tree also. So especially if it's, if it's like for private, I know some people were talking about coffee tables, your bowls or whatever private thing they're doing, if they felt like sharing that, that's a form of a love letter too, if it's a succumb. We're going to ask them to share their stories of maple and pictures. Yeah, that's a great idea. And there was one woman who came from Maine to pick up wood, who was going to make something and then donate it to the committee so that we could auction it off or raffle it off or something. I never heard anything from her, but maybe I'll check back in and see what happened. That's great, thank you. Any other comments on this? All right, so Arbor Month event review. I think it did unmute quick enough. I'm happy to help Brit with thoughts and writing and things like that. I do think that Mary Maple could be a very big part of this, but I agree that it should also be, about education, about life cycles and the work that the committee does too. Yes. Great. Great. Great, okay. Last call. All right, Arbor Month event review. I think most of them went pretty good except the book reading didn't go so well, but I was at the library today and saw the young bride. It's gonna be a while till the two match, you know? So, but it was very nice that we did that. I'm very happy we did that. Anybody else have comments? I'd like that. Thank you everybody for helping out. And both the library and the museum and it was college, all said that they would be interested in something again next year. So we can hopefully do a better job promoting the book reading activities that involve kids. It's just a tough group to get. It's a tough time of day. It's difficult, but you may have to work with the teachers more than the library. Depending upon people bringing their kids to the library. So. I also mentioned yesterday, we could partner with the museum and I'm sure we could help promote it or bring some artists or authors in to do book readings. So that would be helpful too. I'm sorry, I missed the event. I was out of town, but did the work on the groom tree, the big one, did all the pruning and cabling and all that take place already? No, yeah. It's hopefully gonna take place either later this week. Looks like it's gonna be early next week, midweek, next week that the work will take place. Because there's so many shoots and things coming off of that. Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah. I was actually thinking if we have that guy from the US Forest Service come back, maybe do an evening public event in a town location rather than the college location, we might get a different crowd at least or more crowd that's connected with us. So yeah, good. Other comments? I just wanted to add, I thought it was great that a lot of your crew, Alan and folks who are on the grounds and facilities crew at Amherst College were there for that talk and that they could get continuing education credits for that. I thought that was great. Yeah. Okay. Individual tree requests. That's been on there, cause we do get some requests as Julian mentioned, but we haven't really figured out a system or a way to do it. We could plant them ourselves. We could, you know, with Alan dropping them off and dropping off a small load of chips or something like that. But what do we want to do when people have ideas or how many people would be willing to do a planting on their own at someone's house if we got a request? Yeah. So most of us then are all of us. So if we get a request for a tree from a homeowner, Alan, can we go ahead and say yes and use our money and you'll bring the tree over or whatever? Yeah, we can work it out. You know, you have to, you know, there's always conversation around species and location and getting the dig saves done and all that stuff. And then getting the trees and then coordinating with you to, you know, what day is going to be there? So you can't leave a tree. Often you can't leave these trees sitting overnight, you know, because they may walk away. I just wanted to ask, just to clarify, we're talking about, we're not talking about planting a tree anywhere on private, someone's private property. We're talking about planting it within the public way or the setback, right? Yeah, that's what we're talking about. Yeah, okay. Cause I would not support using public money to buy trees and plant trees further back. So. Yeah, that's agreement. So maybe we need to come up with a written system and then we'll share that around and maybe I'll work on something like that. And then if we agree to that, then we have a system and then someone requests a tree. We say, here's the system. Here's what the homeowner needs to do. Here's what we'll do. Here's what Alan will do and get that solved. Yes? Sounds good. Okay. So let me write myself a note about that. Alan, if you had to guess, how many in a given month during planting season, how many requests in the old days, would you get for something like that? Do you even know? Well, in the old days when we were advertising tree planting and trying to get people to take trees cause we had our mission was to get them planted. You know, we probably get a dozen requests a week maybe. But right now, you know, I can go weeks without getting a request to plant a tree. Yeah, and there's only like two or three come in every spring to our email address. So yeah. Okay. Great. All right, good. Town tree tour. We talked about doing one in the fall and Alan, you and I still want to should get together and try to come up with something written or some sort of app or something, some way to do this. Do you have anything else to add or anyone else? Nope. All right. Second Saturday planting May 13th. Alan, you want to run the explain the system for this month? Yeah. So we're just going to start on orchard data section. Is that what you're asking me to? Yeah. Yeah. And then we're going to work our way down North Pleasant Street. There's a couple of trees. Sorry, North Hampton Road towards South Pleasant Street. There's two trees on the corner there. And then we'll turn right onto South Pleasant and start planting down that street. And then there's one tree on Woodside and I may have an extra tree now. So we may put another tree on either Woodside or put it over where the trees are cut down there, but on Pickery. Itchka? No. Walnut. Walnut. Yeah, walnut. I might have an extra swamp right, Oak. So whoever's there, we might have to keep an eye out for people who are wanting to volunteer and since we're moving target, but the publicity does say we're starting an orchard and North Hampton Road. So as it gets later, keep your eye out for people that might be struggling. And as many people as can, please do try to come since at least two of us won't be there. Alan, I'm just gonna convey something that I'm sure you've already considered, but the friend wrote this to me about this, so it's very short, I'm just gonna read it to you. I'll walk and drive along that section of route down almost every day and the road and sidewalk and permits on both sides of the street are still very much in progress and will be for the next year or so. And there's carryover related construction and staging on nearby streets such as Kendrick, Dana and sometimes Blue Hills. The stressful environment right now for all that the new trees are going in anywhere close to all that construction chaos may be waiting. So I know that I saw that and I registered that and I also think that you're pretty aware of everything going on over there, but felt like I needed to hear that. Yeah, it's true that they removed all the trees that they felt wouldn't survive and the trees that are on private property that are away from the road are still going to be impacted by this. So we will see, remember those will decline in the years to come, gotta get new trees planted. Yeah, great. And all the ones that have been removed on orchard like the old sugar maples, they're not right on route nine. They're pretty far down, so. Yeah, well, there were actually three large sugar maples that were taken down that was at the route nine end when the grass felt there. A few years ago, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the section we're really planting this time. We're not doing much further down. Got it. Okay. And we don't have a location yet for June, do we? And we're gonna plant or we're gonna do a tree care day. Be nice to plant, but we can monitor the weather and see if we're in El Nino already. Do you have a couple of ideas for either planting or tree care? We had a list in one of our meeting minutes. I remember doing that of suggested places. I would have to look at our last meeting notes to see what that was. I'll top them ahead, I don't have it. I can pull up the minutes I took. I don't seem to have it. I think it's in my... Oh, here it is. Main Street, route nine, Belcher Town Road, College Street, Watson Farm, Dana and Blue Hills, we did, right? We did. And Orchard Street we're doing, so not too bad. All those other ones are gonna continue to be under construction though, right? Belcher Town Road, College, route nine. Yeah, where's Watson Farm? I don't know. That was a Julian, Julian, that was one of your... Yeah, Watson Farm is off of Main Street in between, in between Main Street and College Street, route nine, down towards Fort River Elementary School. So it's probably private property. No, it's owned by the Housing Authority in Amherst, so it's public property. It's public property, it's not part of the public way. There's not 10 roads on them. Oh, okay. So it's not like the town, the town owns it, but it's not a public way. Correct, yeah, it's the Housing Authority. Okay, so that's different than the DPW owning the town common. Correct. Okay, I see. So I mean, it definitely would qualify, in my opinion, for, you know, that would be like one of those TD Bank North or whatever it is, grants. You know, because that would probably qualify for like an environmental justice grant. Same with the boulders, you know, we talked about, you know, trying to do something with one of those. So that's those types of locations we could, there are grants out there we could get to purchase trees to plant there and not use the funds that are dedicated towards public shade trees. Right, that makes sense. And they wouldn't be considered public shade trees because they're not on the right away. Correct. Okay, got it, cool. Julian, maybe do you wanna try reaching out to the Housing Authority and talking about that we'd love to do some tree planting there when we might be able to get a grant to do it? Sure, yeah. And could I ask maybe they would provide the funds as well? I don't know. HUD provides funds for, you know, tree planting as well. So that would be, you know, opportunity there for more funding. I'll look into it and we'll call them maybe even tomorrow. Great, I think that's a great idea. Okay. The point that I wanted to raise, I received an email from a member of the community that I don't know probably a month ago asking if we had a policy on planting native trees and suggesting that we focus on, you know, when we have the opportunity on planting native. So I said I would share that with the committee and I had reported back that generally we try to, you know, often we plant native trees. We certainly don't plant invasive trees, but I think the practice has been to go with what is available and what is, what we know will do well in the area. But I wanted to raise that issue of perhaps trying to prioritize native species. So as not to reproduce, you know, some Norway Maple equivalent in 50 years. Yeah, I think it's a good issue. I think we have talked about it and partly it's separate, it's not in the forest where it will spread more easily, but it's also, there's just so few trees that we can plant anymore. Since we can't do beaches, we can't do sugar maples, we can't do hemlocks, we can't do ash, you know, et cetera. So I think we're just trying to find a diversity of trees that will grow well in the public right away. I think that's pretty much our policy. You could say that, we could fine tune it, we could have a discussion about that if people want. Yeah, I said I want to bring it up. I mean, I agree, you know, at this point, I don't see the harm in planting like a ginko tree, for example, you know, if we know that it will do well, but I think, yeah, obviously staying away from invasives is a smart strategy, so, but we already do that. It would be, you know, it could be worse, you know, it would be something that would be in the management plan, urban forestry management plan, which would, you know, say that, you know, there is no written policy, so you could actually write a policy that says our policy is to, you know, where possible plant native trees, something along that line, or we plan to plant, you know, 80% native species, you know, try to reach that goal of a year, something. Nothing's written down right now, so. I think it'd be good to actually have a written policy. Does anyone want to take a stab at that? I can take a stab at that. Okay. As long as the, I will take, as my lead, I'll take what Alan just said, which I think makes sense, and I think we will get more, this is only, I mean, I'm interested, we're all interested in planting native trees wherever we can, and we're going to get, and I think it's becoming a bigger issue, and even that article that I put in the newsletter this month was about, I mean, there's an issue about native versus non-native plants, and that one as well, so it's getting it, it's becoming more prominent, so I think it would be good for us to have that. I'll work on it. I would tend to agree, thanks for being willing to write that up. Great, yeah, I think that'd be good to actually have a written policy that we can share. Well, thanks, Britt, if you're still there. Okay, there she is, yeah. All right, town budget line item, I think we can celebrate almost, it hasn't passed the town council, but I think we've really come a long way, and maybe we should hold off on the celebration, but it's very exciting, yeah. It is, it's pretty exciting, and thank you, everybody. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah, I heard from my friend, John Root, he wrote a couple of letters, and then he got a response, and he shared all of them with me, it was very nice, so that's great. All right, town budget line item, are you mass interns, anything new on that? Well, it's like Catherine might be interested in helping out in some way, either as a volunteer or for credit, and if we have other specific things that we're looking for, I could certainly reach out to folks in this class from this semester. I know there's one student who's been doing tree inventory stuff for DCR, or I think it's DCR, pretty sure it's DCR. So yeah, if I have a better, I feel like I say this every month and then I forget, but if I have a better sense of specific things that students could be helpful with, then I can see what folks might be up for. Well, do we wanna brainstorm a list of things or should we table out till next month, or? I think now, better than next month, because they're all gonna be gone. Okay. You're talking about interns for the committee, to help the committee do things? Is that what we're discussing? Yeah, more help you. Yeah. So it just all start, if they're gonna be working with the town, and I can try to have them do tree related things most of the time, but the reality is they'll get stuck doing a lot of different things if they end up doing an internship with the town. Okay. Which is good, I mean, they're all good experiences, but it's not, if someone wanted just inventory experience. Right. I could make that happen 80% of the time, 20% of the time they could be dragon brush or wielding a string trimmer. So in terms of the committee, what would be helpful? I mean, I heard, I know we've talked a little bit about an app or designing something for the tree tour. Right, would that be one item? Yes. Okay. I mean, even just tree planting when we do the second Saturday plantings. Okay. Other ideas? I mean, yes, the social media kind of stuff, making things more, somebody who's into more programming kind of things to make everything more automated, less human data entry for the stuff that we do. Yeah, there was, I have her email, there was a computer science PhD student at UMass who came and picked up Mary Maple, a Mary Maple round and was really excited about it and had gone out and bought the 1975 trees of Amherst book and was trying to identify all of them. So she, and she had said she would be interested in volunteering. That's great. Another idea is we could have them actually help us deliver or coordinate the delivery of the Mary Maple wood and that type of stuff. Yeah, so maybe I'll reach out, I could reach up to her and see if she's interested. I mean, I think that would be like volunteer work for her. Yeah, and Bennett would, if you had someone to help you with the redesign of the website. You know, I think that's most, I was thinking about that. That's mostly if the programming part is mostly a function of what the town can offer and the town could help with that. The holdup on that is content. Like, you know, like, I think what, the way that would work is we would hand over, you know, word doc or Google doc or something with all the stuff that we wanted there with some organizing principle. And the town says, okay, we're going to put that into our template based on our, you know, CMS system. I think that I'm making this up, but I don't think we would hand them a program to anything for the website, I don't think. Yeah, I was thinking more in terms of helping you, you've come up with ideas and you haven't had time to put them into fruition, you know. Yeah, that's mainly just writing. Maybe I have to get chat GPD to do that. Let's do that again. Hi, Joe. Go ahead, Rick. I was gonna say it could be interesting to see if anyone is interested in doing some of the background research that Sarah and I had talked a little bit about on the significant pre-ordnance, right? Like figuring out what other significant pre-ordnances look like. So that would be more of like a research position that I could give Reddit for. One of the, one of the things we've been wanting to do for a while is get like a tree canopy analysis done, like percent canopy for the town. Okay. Some of the things that would help us identify, you know, running the I tree analysis on the existing data we have for the benefits of the trees we have in Victoria. Right. Okay. So I'll write this up and I'll send it to the students that I've been working with in the last few years and see if anyone is interested either in volunteer work or work for credit. Yeah. The tree nursery item, I would love for us to do that, especially after having seen how Greenfield has developed quite a nursery and UMass has a tree nursery. So maybe we partner with them to trees in them, but the trees we were giving out left much to be desired in terms of quality of seedlings. So if we had a way to grow things, okay, Britt, yeah. Anyway, so I don't think we have the people power to do it right now, but let's keep that in mind. We have the location now. So I do have the potential location on Station Road with water available. Where on Station Road at the farm? Yeah, at the old horse barn. Yeah, where the Merritt Maple Ward is right now. Yep. So we could fence off in the area there and we have access to water. That's great. That's a great news of that. I was wondering what was gonna happen with that because it's a pretty large piece of property. Yeah, we could get something started there and if for some reason we get kicked out of there, then we just dig up the trees and plant them. Well, should we maybe think about one of our planting days we set up the nursery? We need to figure out species that we wanna grow. We need to think how we're gonna grow, we're gonna grow bags. There's a number of things that have to be discussed, but definitely species is what are we gonna grow? So let's think about what species we might wanna grow and come up with a list for next month and start moving ahead with this, yeah? I'd love that I drive or ride my bike by there twice a day at least. So keep an eye on things. Great. I did, we did grow Turkish hazel trees and somebody that I knew who's interested in them asked me for a list and I talked to Alan and there are some still alive and it's quite exciting. So not a lot of them survived and some of them didn't get dug up in time but at least one I planted on my property because we had no place to plant it and needed to come out of the ground. So timing is really key. That's what I've learned on nursery. You want them in the grow bags for a certain amount of time but not too long and not too short, so yeah. All right, good. We talked about the tree inventory. The History Museum, we've pretty much talked about the library trees. Anything new on that, Sarah? If you're an update on the library tree. Yes, there is. So there is an event this Saturday, the 13th to have people come and explore. It's called Pope's Garden. Oh, well, okay. So the Kinsey Memorial Garden at the Jones Library is pretty much going to be removed for the expansion. I don't know how much is going to be able to be maintained but a lot of it is going away. And there's a proposal to transplant some of the plants to the New Kestrel Land Trust location. So that's been approved and the Amherst Garden Club is going to support that transplanting effort. So some of them are going to be removed to the Kestrel Land Trust location and Carol Pope, who was one of the designers of the garden is going to open her personal garden in Amherst for a tour this Saturday, May 13th from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. It's on High Street in Amherst and the idea is to have it be a fundraising event to support moving some of the selected plantings from the Kinsey Garden to the Kestrel, their new location at the Kestrel Land Trust headquarters. But all those big trees will come down. I don't know if it's all or not. My understanding, what I saw, I don't know if it's the final plan but there is the one big oak tree kind of closest to the building and that little bump-out parking spot in the back that we have to go. And there's a couple of trees kind of run around the side of the building probably not coming as well. I thought the last plan I saw had two trees being destroyed for that but I could be wrong, it changes often. There's some design work still being done out front so there was some tree impact out front but it depended upon how they end up doing the walkway. They do it one way, you lose trees, if you do it a different way, you don't lose trees. So it depends. All right. Anything else on this? State level initiatives. I haven't done anything lately but talking about the tree on College Street yesterday is like, yeah, really, this is something that we should be working on if we have the energy to do that. Yeah, I think it's worth thinking about how to engage in the complete streets discussion because if this is happening here, this is happening everywhere they're putting in complete streets. And so, I don't know if other tree committees across the state are having similar experiences and they're also getting frustrated by all these removals for complete streets if it's worth connecting with them in some way but I think it would be productive to try to engage at the state level with, especially with this complete streets push. All right. Yeah, I'll reach out again to Mindy and Joe Cumberford. We did before when Julie and I spoke at the Tree Wardens Dinner some months ago, there were people from other tree committees there and we spoke about the four basic things, the update to chapter 87, the complete streets. I can't remember what the others were, but yeah. There is a grad student, I think it's a grad student that UMass working to think on the MassDOT Complete Streets project. Is this the Stockbridge student that you had mentioned? I think so, I'm not sure. I've heard several, so projects all at once and I'm confusing them so I can't, I'm not sure. Somebody there is working to help MassDOT assess the community temperature on complete streets as far as trees go. So they've, it turns out they did do the survey and this student is compiling the survey. I'm not sure what they're gonna do with it yet, but it might be worth reaching out to somebody or I can try to find out who it is. Yeah, and what happens when the survey results come back and turns out no one cares about? Well, people do and yeah. Yeah, it was hard to, I think, if we got all the tree committees in the state to start clamoring for something, maybe it would happen, but maybe it's just we just keep encouraging our local people, but Mindy and Joe are very supportive of us and they know the issues at least, so yeah. All right, significant tree ordinance. Anything on that, Sarah? Nope. Nope, no update from me. Okay, and the solar bylaw group, I did see their meeting again soon. Julian. I actually went last time but did not catch when they were meeting again. I will check the website about that right now. Yeah, I got some email, I didn't look at it today, but if I find it, I'll forward it to you. Okay, that is great. I am checking now. Okay. Not about the specific solar bylaw group, but there is a company, Trinity Solar, who's been canvassing my neighborhood and I've seen their signs up around. And so they're offering people to do solar and I don't know, it's a whole thing. He's got a whole spiel, right? But he'd said they would include cutting down trees for free. So just there are there are other companies who are including tree removal as part of their solar package to try to get people to sign up for solar panels. So there's definitely a need before too many people start chopping down trees, trying to get private solar. Yeah, it might be time to remind people of the factors, they don't own the trees in front of their house. Good business model, you do solar, so then you start a little side tree company to do tree rules. All right, anything else? Real quick on that point, I don't think that I have the knowledge or probably time to write anything in depth about that in the newsletter, but if any, I've heard about the issues of, you know, community solar and cutting down large swamp, but I haven't, I actually haven't thought about the issue of private, like just putting solar on your house and having it bundled with the tree removal, which I assume is widespread now that you mentioned it. If anyone comes across some sort of media, I'll look myself, but there's any sort of media article about that or I don't know, it's really interesting and not great and it's something we should be talking about more, not that our newsletter with its 200 subscribers is going to move the needle necessarily, but it's not nothing either, so anyway, that's something I'd like to share. So if you see that, please send it to me as well as any tree related articles always. But we had, I'll just say, we had solar put on our house two or three years ago after we moved in and basically they give you a shade analysis and they'll present you with options. Like they're looking at the canopy around your home and they'll say, well, without these trees that will increase your capacity X amount. So I hadn't heard previously until just now about this option of they will literally cut the trees down for you, but I even had a neighbor approach me and say, we want to get solar, but it's so shady we'd have to cut down this big pine, these other trees, like what do you think? What's the trade off your which is more important? And I said, leave the trees. The trees are more important, for a variety of reasons in this case, because they're big old trees, but I think it is something that people don't really think about in terms of the lost value of these trees when they think they're making the green choice, putting in solar or at least the economical choice. So. Yeah. And I just checked the solar bylaw working group meeting is this Friday from 1130 to 130 and I can make that this week. So that will work. The idea was floated that it might have come from the bylaw group, solar bylaw group that if someone is putting solar on their house and they cut down trees on their property, this is kind of like the significant tree ordinance, then they have to pay into a fund to plant more trees around town somewhere else or something like that. Yeah, no, I think that would be a very good idea. And then soon enough, it will become part of these people's business model to include covering that cost as well. How would you, what would the legal, so you're suggesting like a policy mechanism that would require? It's permitting the mechanisms that if you permit a solar panel. Right, that's interesting. Yeah, maybe we should look into that too. I think that's an interesting point. All right, Catherine and Lucia, do you wanna add anything? No, I don't think so. All right, well thank you for joining us and thank you everyone for all your work. Any last comments before we go? I will just like to point in today's Gazette, there's an article about a proposed bill about expanding tree canopy in Massachusetts. I meant to bring it up. I can't remember even the headline of it, but I've never heard of it. I'm sure maybe Alan, you've probably heard of this, but there's news to me. So. The state is, thanks to the federal government, getting a lot of money in their urban forestry part of their program to help promote tree canopy, especially in environmental justice communities. And we do have some neighborhoods in town that would qualify for environmental justice neighborhoods. We might really get a small piece of that. Oh, I have something to add, a separate note. I was speaking with Mindy Dom and she said that they get airmark money from the state, every state rep and senator. And she said that if we didn't get the 40,000 from the town to let her know what was missing and she would try to make up the difference with airmark money. So there is some other money available. So yeah, anyway, we need to pursue all these things at once, right? Lucia writes, thank you so much for your time and work for Amherst and again, great. Thank you. All right, I think we can call this meeting adjourned. Thank you everybody. We'll see you from Saturday. Thanks. Have a nice time. Bye. Good luck Saturday and I'll be in touch with them back. So yeah. Right. Yeah. Good night. Good night.