Minutes - City of Montpelier, Vermont

Montpelier Tree Board
Minutes for March 7, 2013 Meeting: 5:30pm Memorial Room, City Hall
In attendance: Members -­‐ Sarah Hoffmeier (co-­‐chair), John Van Deren, Geoff Beyer, John Akielaszek;
Volunteers – Bob Troester, Shelley Mchlenbacher
Introduced volunteers and members to new attendee, Shelley M.
Congratulated John A. on his appointment to the board.
Reviewed February minutes – two corrections, adding Jeff S to the new board members and a
spelling correction were noted.
Sarah gave an update on the Tree Board Plan. She met with Wendy B. and Linda H. on Feb. 21 st to
discuss the plan that Linda, Clare R., and Wendy had done in 2011. The plan is close to being done
and needs only the appendix to be finished, photos added, and citing of some tree benefits facts.
Sarah and Linda H. will meet to get the document in final draft form by the next meeting.
Geoff suggested to get Tom McArdle’s input on the Plan as well as other city commissions and
boards. Sarah offered to meet with Tom M. after the Tree Board and volunteers offer their
edits.
The volunteer spreadsheet was passed around for meeting attendees to fill in. Sarah explained the
importance of the keeping track of hours for showing the value of the board and its volunteers to
the city.
The March 2 nd Farmer’s Market table was discussed. John A and John V. D. both commented on the
number of people who asked about invasive species and pests. And, that another of the most
common question was what the tree board really does. It was suggested by John A. and Sarah that
for the next market (April 6 th ) that a raffle be held to get potential volunteers emails and contact
information. The raffle would give the winner a choice of a tree from the TB nursery with the
advice on where to plant it on their property. John A. suggested that the Tree Board could even
plant the tree for the winner. Also, he thought it would draw in more people to have a large paper
machete beetle or large branch possibly created by students. Sarah thought maybe the Union
Elementary students could be approached.
Volunteers for the next Farmer’s Market are: John Snell, John Akielaszek, Sarah Hoffmeier,
Abby Colihan, Carole Naquin, Bob Troester, and Shelley Mchlenbacher. Sarah said that a
schedule will be emailed around, but if anyone has a particular slot they want to work, to
email John Snell.
Geoff agreed with dates and times of the pruning workshops and offered to do the March 28 th
pruning workshop on Stonecutters Way – meeting at the Co-­‐op. The dates are: John S. March 23rd
10am-­‐noon (co-­‐op), Geoff April 13th 10am-­‐noon (co-­‐op), Geoff March 28th 4:30pm – 6pm (Co-­‐op)
If John Snell could email around the poster he did for the Farmer’s Market, folks at the
meeting offered to post a few around town. Sarah will contact Dave Wilcox again to see if he
is interested in doing a pruning workshop in the next two months.

The nursery was discussed with regards to new plantings. Geoff suggested only irrigating the first
two rows and keeping the 15-­‐20 trees in those rows rotating out every 2-­‐3 years. In addition to
the Winooski Tree Sale and the Branch Out Burlington Sale, Geoff mentioned Northern Nurseries
in WRJ. He also commented that the Tree Board could benefit from purchasing a tree tarp for
transporting trees. John Van Deren will not be renewing his appointment as a member of the TB,
but offered that Carole would be a good contact for moving forward with the irrigation of the
nursery. John VD will still be an active volunteer. A volunteer is still needed to update the
nursery map.
New plantings from the nursery will be focused on Barre Street, but it was also suggested from a
farmer’s market attendee to look at School Street and St. Paul Street.
As the discussion moved into inventory and website issues, Geoff offered that his Americorp
volunteer would be able to place TB information or events on the City Webpage.
Bob gave a thorough update on his progress with the Open Tree Map (OTM) and other
components of the Tree Inventory Software: He was able to map the CAN neighborhood districts
and load them into the OTM database. He needed more space and purchased an external hard
drive (which he did not want reimbursement for) in order to put OpenTreeMap and its host
operating system in a "virtual machine." Bob explained how a virtual machine is what you start
with, if you spend the money to hire a hosting company like Amazon Web Services or others who
provide you with a "computer in the cloud." The huge advantage of working in a virtual machine is
that you can build your complicated environment, and from the outside it looks like a large file,
which you can then copy elsewhere to almost any kind of host computer server without any
changes at all and then run it. Bob should be able to move the file around without having to redo
his work. Bob feels OTM has enough of the management tools that Geoff needs as well as the
citizen interaction. But it does take a long time to figure out. In the meantime Azavea now has OTM
set up for six major US cities. Bob also mentioned www.treezilla.org, an independent setup of
OpenTreeMap which is mapping Britain. He is going to keep working on OTM and will keep us
posted at the next meeting.
Sarah briefly mentioned that grants and signs for the downtown trees as well as the tree walk map
will be discussed further at the next meeting. She also reminded folks to check out the webinar on
March 20 th about ‘Effective Tree Boards’. Finally, Sarah asked if anyone else knew about
ameliorating the effects of salt using gypsum. John Snell would like to try this and Sarah
encouraged folks to look into it further.
The meeting adjourned at 6:45pm. The next meeting is set for Thursday, April 4, 2013 at 5:30pm.