MINUTES of the MRWC Meeting March 3, 2004:
Announcements:
1) Please check OSU's College of Forestry website for their new management plan.
There is an opinion poll you can fill out;
2) Kids Day for Conservation is already starting planning activities for the
Sept. 18th event.
COMMITTEE REPORTS:
Outreach & Education: Met and assigned roles for the Solstice event at Tyee
Winery. More volunteers are needed. Please contact Sandra if interested. Water
Quality: No meeting will be held until funding is received for the grant which
was approved;
Land, Air & Water Quality: Met last month and put together a GIS unit email
survey. Please fill out the 5 questions. Ken Crourse and intern Tasha Wolf, will
work on the GIS project, trying to develop a web accessible GIS-interface, whose
goal is to make information available to the public. Please contact Ken Crouse
if interested. Kcrouse@earthlink.net.
Fish Passage: their grant was selected for funding, covering future work on
Blakesley and Beaver creeks. Next meeting will be at the district
office,Thursday 4pm. Also meeting March 13th--volunteers welcome--from 9am-2pm
at the Conservation District. Stacey Carpenter gave a power point
presentation entitled "Restoring Access to Stream Habitat", compiled jointly by
the MRWC, Benton Co., and the Benton Co. SWCD. The objective is to provide maps
and database showing potential and actual barriers to fish in 6th field, and to
encourage cooperative efforts between landowners to remove these barriers and
restore fish passage. The Norton Creek project was completed last summer. Help
obtaining landowner permission, as well as information on fish passage barriers,
was requested of MRWC members.
Steering Committee: Did not meet in Feb. Chuck Lane discussed 1) the state of
the proposed partnership with the City of Philomath and 2) the conference on
watershed councils, whose 2-day meeting focused on encouraging councils to stay
relevant and work together. This would allow an increase in capacity to perform
projects (due to economy of scale) and also would clarify and improve their
public image. Communication with local legislators was urged.
Sandra Coveny gave the Coordinator's Report: She was invited by OWEB to organize
a coordinator conference to help coordinators with support. There is also an
opportunity to work with the Avery Park Nature Center to develop an exhibit.
Call Sandra for details. Also, there are restoration opportunities, e.g. at
Marys River Park, which are starting to integrate our action plan with the
Benton County Comprehensive Plan.
Our Guest Speaker for the evening was Wayne Hoffman, the Mid-Coast Watershed
Council Coordinator. The Mid-Coast group is considerably different in emphasis,
since they are salmon-centric, and much larger than we are. They have a budget
of $1 million and a bookkeeper, project manager, education person, and a full
time coordinator. Like us, they have done an assessment, and have an action plan
for their broad region. For example, they have approximately 60 miles of Coho
summer habitat to monitor. Using slides, Wayne explained how monitoring was
accomplished with snorkel surveys. He also showed slides of helicopters carrying
large trees, to help place trees in rather inaccessible places, to increase
stream structure. He also provided us with monitoring data, something that
rarely gets funded. The data showed there was a major increase the number of
fish present several months later, because of better larval retention.
Moreoever total number of fish the following summer was also much higher, and
this was also true the following winter. Many questions followed his informative
presentation. The meeting was adjourned at 8:59.