Title
Open Space Advisory Subcommittee Report
Body
Open Space Advisory Subcommittee
Wednesday, October 10, 2017
In attendance: Eric Peterson, Jonathan Creel, Liz Aicher, Stephanie Nakhleh
1. Trails Mgmt. County is working with IMBA procurement process and it’ll tie into Trails Management Plan. Eric is working through Craig Martin’s checklist, making good headway. IMBA representatives will spend a few weeks assessing trails sometime soon and hopefully they will say, Los Alamos has made Bronze Level. No date on this assessment yet.
2. The Flow trail (in LA County) plan is back to Brian Brogan, Harry Burgess, and the Council.
3. Canyon Restoration: The kick-off meeting was scheduled for Oct 12 with Brian, Chris Wilson, and Eric Martinez, who is the county engineer. The plan is to stick to Graduation Canyon, with a narrow scope of work. The county has a $20k budget.
4. 50 trail signs are on order. Jonathan said people are coming into PEEC and praising the signs. Eric said the county is working from Cliffs Site westward toward the Aquatic Center.
5. I updated the group on the meeting with the Los Alamos Fire Department. Eric Sterna, the new Fire Chief, is interested in working with Open Space to ensure that wildfire mitigation is as nature- and trail-friendly as possible. We discussed having LAFD in for a discussion, and maybe reviewing Mike Steinzig’s 2016 presentation on canyon restoration.
6. Open Space is set for fence removal on Oct 28 with PEEC.
7. Liz: It’s time for us to review Open Space plan, we need to review it every year by December. There’s a lot of stuff in the plan that maybe we shouldn’t worry about, like viewsheds, like GPSing trees, let’s all take a look at that. We should also look at management objectives that don’t match the tasks that are outlined. Also canyons like Rendija are in the plan but aren’t County land (yet). Maybe we should re-write the task section? Also, let’s put a timeline on it: e.g., done by 2018. Done by 2019. Also, what can Fire Dept help with? What can volunteers help with? Post to Facebook, pull together volunteer group to pull cheat grass. Eric: we need some sort of training though so people pull and saw the right things.
8. The Los Alamos County Open Space page is going to merge into a new Community service page that will incorporate Aquatics, Recreation and Open Space.
9. The Open Space Advisory Subcommittee regular monthly meeting will switch from the second Tuesday of every month to the second Wednesday of every month, due to a scheduling conflict for one member.