Grand Lake St. Mary’s Restoration Commission
For
Grand Lake St. Marys Lake Restoration Initiative (LIR)
November 29, 2010 Meeting Minutes

Note:  These minutes are prepared only for the use of the members of the Commission and their further distribution is prohibited without the express permission of the LRC Facilitator.

The Grand Lake St. Marys Restoration Committee met at 11:30 A.M on November 29, 2010 at the Wright State University Lake Campus.  Members present were:

Also in attendance were Supporting Members - Linda May, Bruns Realty, and Tim Lovett, LIA President.

The minutes of the November 22 meeting were approved.

Tom K. shared reported that Findlay University will be visiting next week to discuss some grant collaboration opportunities.  An example of a recent solicitation letter by the Ohio Environmental Council was distributed and discussed.  They are using the Grand Lake issues as part of their platform. Also, a UD grad student from the Findlay area is working on a new technology that removes phosphorus from water.  The partnering firm is named Thieman Technology, but not related to our local manufacturer.  Tom also wanted to remind our commission members that we will have a special presentation on Friday December 17, by Kevin Reichert of CTL Engineering during lunch, which he is providing to those in attendance.

The CVB is hosting a carp derby organizational meeting on Wednesday with invited marina owners and sportsmen’s clubs to explore the opportunity to hold an event on Grand Lake this next spring.  Brian updated the group on Ohio Aggregates continued dredging interest.  They have recently conducted core sampling and are studying the use of a photo press to remove excess water from the dredge material prior to transporting.  This practice is common with the private sector dredging that occurs. We should have some feedback from them in the next two weeks.

Jared Ebbing reported that Vorhees has a draft CIC 501 c(3) template for the counties to review.  This entity would be our first generation legal body to represent our regional commission.  Tom also related that he was the guest speaker at Coldwater Kiwanis last week and received positive feedback on our lake progress and formation of a legal entity from several members.  Jared cautioned that we need to watch what is happening with the Blanchard Conservancy formation and avoid clichés in their process when forming our own.  This seems to reinforce our need to create a newer hybrid district formation.

Brian was concerned about paying for electricity on the Barnes Creek collector, and felt that the St. Marys Township may need to be approached personally to further encourage their participation. The Airy Gators have been removed, cleaned and stored for the winter.  All curtains have been removed.  We still await pilot test results.  Note that the third dredge is not new and ours exclusively, but shared with other ODNR properties.  We should start seeing some pipe installed near Coldwater Creek soon, so that additional dredging can start this spring.

The development of the master plan was discussed at length with KCI staff in a teleconference call.  An outline of the master plan was reviewed as was a worksheet that would be used to evaluate and rank possible courses of action to restore the Lake, on a qualitative yet measurable scale. Also discussion of consolidated efforts between OEPA, LRC, and Watershed has led to mention of project redundancy so that there is a consolidated front represented in strategy.  Still more input is needed from the LRC in several sections of the plan to finalize it.  The necessity to have a draft of the plan completed by the end of the year to support LRC meetings with elected officials was discussed.  Joe believes that one of the most effective ways we can use the plan is to identify specific action items that legislators can act upon to modify regulations, remove barriers; ie: overcoming the availability of limited public funds.
Laura Walker will run some watershed projects across the point system process to quality check the weighting recommended.  KCI will pull together all the data sets and have a rough compilation by the end of this week, and specifically for our drive time to visit Ball State.  Versions of the printed report were discussed, and a need for a marketing format may still need to be developed separately.

The next meeting of the Commission will be Monday, December 13 at 11:30 A.M. at Wright State University Lake Campus, Rm. 102 Dwyer Hall (admin conference room).   There is no noon meeting on December 6.
 

Minutes prepared by Julie Miller. 

Note:  These minutes are prepared only for the use of the members of the Commission and their further distribution is prohibited without the express permission of the LRC Facilitator.