TRAIL COMMITTEE MINUTES

March 18th, 2009 

Present:  Lenore Budd, Colin McNaull, Frank Twarog, Greg Leroy, Jason Reed, and Launa Lagasse

-         Frank reported on the Thistle Hill development.  Three of the trails are in and are marked. There will be a forth trail that will connect Mechanicsville Road to Lavigne Hill Road once the second phase of this development continues.   Right now sales are slow for the Thistle Hill Development so we cannot get a time estimate as to when this last trail will go in.  Colin suggested a field trip at a future date to check out these trails and to scope out where the proposed forth trail will go.   Colin will set the date for this event.

-         We discussed the possibility of working on a connecting trail between Lincoln Hill and Hollow road. This is Carse property and we would need permission before starting any work in this area.   Jason told us that the Fellowship of the Wheel has already put the work in to creating a trail between these two roads.  As with other Fellowship trails, the traffic on this trail will be limited to bike (non-motorized) and foot traffic. The decision was made to have a field trip to scope out this trail once the weather gets better.  We are hoping to do this on Saturday, June 13^th at 9:00.  The plan will be to drop a few vehicles off at Hollow Road and start our walk from the Lincoln Hill entrance. 

-         Colin requested that we consider using the $350 we have in our budget to install a gate at the entrance of the CoppWelsh. The purpose of this gate would be to block as much of the motorized traffic as we can from entering these trails and causing damage. Lenore suggested we hold off on that decision because it looks like this field/area may be sold to a farmer with sheep.  Depending on where the house might be situated, and where they install the fencing for the sheep, would dictate where we put our gate.  Because of the sheep and the type of fencing the new owners might use, we may not need to put up a gate or perhaps not as large a gate.  We agreed to table this discussion until plans moved forward on the possible sale of this area.

-         Frank brought a book that was in our drawer on the third floor.  It’s the Hinesburg Town Forest: Inventory, Assessments and Management Considerations.  It looks like a great book full of info and maps.  There was a discussion of possibly making copies of this book; however we decided that we could use a signup sheet and take turns.  Jason has been the first to borrow this book and look through it.

-         Several members were not aware that we had our own drawer in the town office.   We took a quick field trip to the 3^rd floor office area to review the contents of our drawer.  Just as you would suspect – maps!

-         Lenore’s other committee, The New Town Forest Planning Committee, has need for new members.  They have recently lost several members and need to recruit replacements.  It was also noted that we would also like to have more members on the Trails Committee as well, we currently have two openings.

-          Lenore brought up the discussion of getting a more complete inventory of already established trails.  Jason mentioned that the Fellowship of the Wheels has their trails mapped and posted on their web site (Hinesburg Town Forest:  http://www.fotwheel.org/hinesburg).  (While visiting their web site I saw this bullet: “Carse Land - 1,000 acres of land contiguous to the HTF, trails currently under construction”.) We (FOTW) do have our maps posted on our web site; our goal is to connect these so that you could complete a loop around the town.  This is a discussion that we have had before but Lenore’s point was that there are trails out there that we are unaware of and these are the trails we need to add to our list of known trails.  As usually this lead to the question of property owners and some not want to share their trail (or section of trial) with the public.  It was agreed that this was a topic we need to continue at our next meeting.

NEXT MEETING:  April 15th