Present: Lynn Leopold, Jerry Codner and Karin Harjes

Before we started with the meeting agenda, Lynn showed us a very neat watershed education booklet made by RE Sources and several other NGO’s and government organizations in Bellingham, Washington. RE Sources has set up a water quality education program where people are encouraged to pledge to live in a way that is more friendly to their watershed. Pledges people can choose from include: to accept a few weeds and hand-pull weeds when they can, avoid over-watering their lawn, try less toxic household products, and cleanup after their pets. When people accept to do a pledge they receive a copper plaque (in the shape of the RE Sources logo and made by a local artist) thank you gift and a refrigerator magnet listing the pledges they have chosen. This seems like a good project for EPPOC and the Network to adopt in the future. Lynn will try to get more copies of the booklet to show the IO and the Network.

Lynn also brought in the winter 2002 issue of The Planet , a magazine published at Western Washington University. This particular issue dedicates several articles to water quality issues.

Karin put up the IO display for Water Week on Friday, May 10 in the Ithaca Commons and Deb was in charge of the display in the Ithaca Farmer’s Market on Saturday, May 11. In addition to the IO poster presentation with information on the IO, the Watershed Characterization, RPP and partner organizations, a display copy of the RPP and copies of the most recent IO Newsletter were made available to the public. Both days there was a very good turnout and several people showed interest in the RPP.

We reviewed printouts of slides of Deb’s presentation on the IO, RPP and priority issues for the Cayuga Lake watershed.

• In general we found that the slides are good but they need to be tailored by location and be made more interesting for Town Board Members.

• Need background slides on types of pollution and existing measures (RPP?)

• May be able to get more location specific data from RPP, IO members, and raw data from Public Participation meetings. Karin will ask Sharon and Deb.

• For the purpose of identifying water quality issues by location, we split up the map of the watershed groups of major subwatersheds in the Cayuga Lake Watershed (see page 11, RPP).

• Jerry will focus on the southern end of the watershed and look at the Streambank/Roadbank survey

• Lynn will do the eastern side of the watershed from Gulf Creek north.

• Karin will do the western side of the watershed from Glenwood Creek north

• Another EPPOC member will do the northern end of the watershed (TBA)

• Current Threats slide: not clear if threats are prioritized by town or by watershed, Karin will ask TAC.

• Need to add a slide from the TAC sediment report explaining why sediment is the #1 priority issue.

Jerry has most of the slides that were used at the Water Quality Monitoring Conference at Wells College. He will print out the slides and bring them to the next meeting. These could be useful resources when people would like more detailed information about a certain topic.

We read over Lynn’s PSAs one more time and chose those that could be combined to reduced them to one on motor oil use and one or two on household hazardous waste. Once they are combined we will start recording them. Karin will remind the other EPPOC members to work on their PSAs and Karin and Jerry will work on theirs so that we have a constant “flow” of PSA’s ready to be recorded. The text of all the PSA’s will be posted on the IO web page for reference.

• A page listing current achievements and activities of the IO would be good. As we are planning to have a PSA dedicated to promoting the IO website as a source of more information, Jerry will add a page listing the PSA’s as part of the IO activities page.

• Information on the hydroseeder proposal for example would be a good thing to add to the web page

• Currently the RPP is not very user friendly on the web site. Once we have the RPP in html format (currently in PDF format) we could have a page of links to specific points of interest and highlights in the RPP so that people don’t need to spend so much time looking for information.

Karin contacted Karin Badey, Education Coordinator of the Lake George Association to find out when it would be a good time to plan a trip to Lake George to learn more about their Floating Classroom project. June or July are still quite flexible for them. EPPOC needs to decide when is a good time for us to go to Lake George and Karin Badey will organize a trip for us with or without a class (depending on the amount of EPPOC members go). Karin also asked if she could send us another copy of their “Our Lake Book” for the IO and the Network to use as a reference and any information she could provide about their floating classroom.

Lora Hine suggested the Honda Foundation as a possible funding source for the Floating Classroom Project. She is very interested in keeping in touch and is looking for further sources of funding for us. EPPOC will not start writing a grant proposal for this project until it is clear how the boat and participants would be insured and we have a 501(c)(3) umbrella organization to serve as the project manager (for the long term, in the short term EPPOC could help). Karin will contact Dennis Montgomery to see what options we have.

Proposed Next Meeting: Thursday, June 13th, 2002 from 5:00pm-6:30pm, location TBA

Submitted by Karin Harjes