Conservation Commission Meeting (07/27/2022)

2022-07-27 · Conservation Commission · 1:28:29 · watch on YouTube →

A conservation commission meeting given over almost entirely to two guests. Rachel, who is applying to the state as a service provider under the Community Resilience Partnership, updated the commission on her grant application, the partners backing it, and the twelve-month process she would run in Durham if it is funded; her application is due August 15 and she asked for a commission member to read a draft. Adam Pereira (?) of the Royal River Conservation Trust asked the commission to support a 74-acre conservation easement on Dave and Chris Colson's New Leaf Farm, which Maine Farmland Trust would fund half of and Land for Maine's Future the other half; the commission voted to write a resolution of support to match the one the select board had passed unanimously the night before. The rest of the meeting was a discussion of whether the Freedom of Access Act really prevents the commission from using shared online documents to organise volunteer projects, which members doubted, and of what upgrading the town's email licences would cost. The commission also noted it still has an open seventh seat.

No written minutes could be matched to this meeting. The transcript records that the speaker changed but never who was speaking, so any name attached to a statement below is inferred from context and is marked (?).

What was discussed

1. 0:09
   Roll call and open seat

   Sam called a roll for the benefit of those attending virtually. The commission has six members, with Juliet (?) attending remotely, and is still looking to fill its seventh seat.

2. 0:09
   Community Resilience Partnership application timing

   Durham had already sent a letter of support to the governor's office. Rachel (?) said applications were originally due July 15 and the deadline was extended to August 15, which gave her time to bring Gray on board. She will file a single service provider application covering Durham, Gray and New Gloucester, and a fellow grant writer is reviewing it.

3. 0:09
   Partners behind the application

   The Royal River Conservation Trust and an environmental economics consultancy Rachel works for part-time have committed letters of support, joined by North Star Planning, a New Gloucester comprehensive planning consultancy, and the Cumberland County Soil and Water District. Others wrote to say they would serve as experts on demand without providing formal letters.

4. 5:26
   Climate migration and housing displacement

   Rachel (?) said the economists quantify things such as the climate contribution to the housing crisis: migration to Maine is real, the people arriving have considerably more money than those already here, and the displacement is felt without being widely understood as a climate effect. Real-time social vulnerability analysis is not fundable under her grant because none of the towns in her cluster is designated a high social vulnerability community, but she said that does not stop them looking at it.

5. 5:26
   Durham's priorities differ from the coastal towns

   Durham has no coastline being lost to sea level rise, so what counts as urgent here is not what is urgent in Freeport or Yarmouth, and those coastal communities are competing for the same pool of money. Rachel (?) said that made it worth getting in early to define what community resilience means in Durham.

6. 5:26
   No clean energy expert on the team

   Rachel named biofuels and alternative energy as the gap in her line-up, noting that the state programme specifically wants emissions reductions and clean energy advancement. She said she wanted to establish first whether that is actually a priority on the ground in Durham before recruiting an expert for it.

7. 5:26
   Request to review the grant application

   Rachel (?) asked whether one commission member, or the whole commission, would read her application and send feedback before she files it ahead of the August 15 deadline. She said she needed only one reader but would welcome more, and that reading it would also show the commission what she plans to do with them over the coming year.

8. 11:13
   Household energy costs and efficiency as the first fuel

   Robin (?) asked whether the environmental economists could work at the level of household bills and pocketbook issues, and how energy efficiency, often called the first fuel, fits a project judged on emissions reductions. Rachel (?) said she wants the demand side of any clean energy conversation settled before the design and build side, because engineering rarely asks how much energy is actually needed.

9. 11:13
   Window Dressers

   Sam (?) said the commission met Megan of Window Dressers the previous month and is keen on running a window insert project as community involvement on a pocketbook issue. Rachel endorsed it as qualifying resilience work and suggested building outward from it to insulating water heaters, a door-by-door inventory of insufficient windows, and windbreaks, saying a tree line sheltering a house from winter wind can save a household several thousand dollars.

10. 17:20
    Who pays for the window inserts

    Juliet (?) asked how the programme reaches households that cannot afford inserts, since the usual model has homeowners paying. The answer was that 30% of a project must go to low-income households and Window Dressers supplies those materials at no charge, with the town finding the volunteers, the space and the labour. Rachel (?) suggested looking at whether other funds, including the New England Grassroots Environment Fund and energy audit money, could cover more, and floated running a rolling programme in Durham over several years.

11. 17:20
    Drought, heat and the agricultural sector

    Robin (?) raised drought, excessive heat and residents without air conditioning alongside farmers she sees struggling at farmers' markets, and asked about shifting crops and livestock. Rachel (?) said the Cumberland County Soil and Water District still defines agricultural soil as tillable, while soil science of the past decade has established no-till as superior, particularly in drought, and argued for perennial agriculture as both farm business resilience and a local food store against scarcity.

12. 22:34
    Soil science and the Gray food forest

    Rachel (?) described being certified in February as a soil food web lab technician, able to test whether a soil's microbiome supports nutrient uptake and yield. On a project in Gray that turned a brownfield into a food forest, funded by a community development block grant, a soil consultant was hired to reset the soil biology, and she said all the vegetation is thriving two years on where it would otherwise have died off like an ordinary street tree planting.

13. 27:34
    The twelve-month process

    Rachel walked through her timeline: a public kickoff event in the first month after the service provider grant is awarded; months two to four working through the state's self-assessment with an addendum of her own on soil, food systems and a local permaculture perspective; then the heaviest stage of workshops, interviews and research involving the commission, the public, select board members and subject matter experts; then prioritisation; and months ten to twelve settling which projects and which funding to pursue.

14. 27:34
    Resolution required to join the partnership

    One of the qualifications for joining the Community Resilience Partnership is bringing a resolution forward at board level. A draft is supplied by the programme, but Rachel wants the language rewritten in Durham's own voice rather than imposed from the state, and expects that to happen in the seven-to-nine-month window.

15. 32:43
    Groundwork before an award

    A member said she had already contacted the school principal, who confirmed the school has a green team and gave her names, and was thinking of asking the fire chief who holds lists of residents likely to be vulnerable: people in trailers near flood zones, food insecure, living alone, self-employed, low income or elderly. Rachel (?) said those are exactly the research phase questions and encouraged the outreach now. She added that she wants more youth workshops than the grant requires so that young people are in leadership roles.

16. 32:43
    One project or several put to the community

    Juliet (?) asked whether the idea is to put several projects, including Window Dressers, to residents, or to pick one and go. Rachel (?) said both: the commission has agency and is ahead of the conversation, but should not assume it knows where the community wants to go, and should host dialogue rather than announce a decision.

17. 38:24
    When community funding opens and whether it will last

    There are two grants: the service provider grant Rachel is applying for, and grants communities apply for themselves, which open about a month after the service providers, in September and March. Asked whether the money will run out, Rachel (?) said the gubernatorial race will probably jeopardise the fund depending on whether climate denial becomes a voter issue, and noted this is the first time in her twenty years of work that a state has provided this kind of funding.

18. 43:46
    Colson farm conservation easement

    Adam Pereira (?), of the Royal River Conservation Trust and speaking also for Maine Farmland Trust, described a project on Dave and Chris Colson's New Leaf Farm at the corner of Davis Road and Chesley Hill Road. The property runs to about 80 acres and the easement would cover about 74 of them, roughly 25 acres of fields and 44 of woods, with the house and farm infrastructure making up the rest. Maine Farmland Trust is doing the pre-acquisition work and negotiating terms; the Royal River Conservation Trust would hold the easement and be responsible for monitoring and enforcing it.

19. 49:19
    Land for Maine's Future and the value of municipal support

    Maine Farmland Trust has half the money to purchase the easement and the other half would come from Land for Maine's Future, which holds $40 million and is in its first-year round for working farms and forests. What Land for Maine's Future prioritises is demonstrated municipal support: Adam had presented to the select board the night before and reported they were unanimous in supporting the project.

20. 49:19
    Keeping the land farmed, and the wider conserved block

    The Colsons farmed commercially for 30 years and have been on the land 40, and want the next owners to farm it commercially and supply local food; they expect to look for those farmers within five to ten years. The transaction would include an option to purchase at agricultural value so the next buyer is a farmer rather than someone wanting an estate. The parcel adjoins 340 acres of conserved land around Runaround Pond, with another project expected within three years covering about 70 acres and three quarters of a mile of stream frontage; Adam (?) said Durham holds part of the largest block of unfragmented, undeveloped land in greater Portland.

21. 55:03
    No Durham member on the land trust board

    Adam (?) said the Royal River Conservation Trust has no board members from Durham, which makes it harder to know local needs and which landowners to approach. The board is not capped. Members discussed whether to include it in the commission's rotating announcement and concluded private conversations would draw more suitable candidates; one member said they would be inclined to volunteer if it did not conflict with policy. The commitment is a monthly board meeting plus a committee.

22. 1:00:21
    Land prices and parcels for sale

    A member had seen a large-acreage sign off Runaround Pond Road, which turned out to be 5.05 acres rather than 50. The largest parcel currently for sale in Durham is 148 acres on Plummer Mill Road (?), held by a development company at about $1.3 million, with a strip of resource protection at the entrance and enough wetland that a cluster subdivision could not be laid out on part of it. Adam (?) said Maine Farmland Trust could produce data on how the cost of protecting land has risen as land prices roughly doubled since 2020.

23. 1:00:21
    Grassland birds and mowing dates

    Members discussed bobolink nesting and a nearby field mowed on July 14, where rain forced a pause that left an unmowed centre and may have let the chicks fledge. The wider point was that some landowners will delay mowing, but after two dry summers the choice between feeding dairy cattle and preserving grassland bird habitat is an easy one for a farmer to make.

24. 1:06:19
    What the easement would and would not allow

    The easement runs in perpetuity and extinguishing one requires going to the Maine attorney general. It is not a no-touch preservation model, which Adam (?) said is rare: the fields are meant to stay in farming, and the woodlot would likely require a forest management plan, sometimes subject to approval by the easement holder.

25. 1:06:19
    Whether FOAA bars collaboration tools

    The commission had asked about getting access to Outlook collaboration tools and been told the Freedom of Access Act meant they could not edit a document outside a meeting. One member, who manages complex projects for the federal government under comparable rules, said she found that disturbing given the volunteers, tasks, donations and room reservations a project like Window Dressers involves. She pressed the state's public access ombudsman and could not get a straight answer, then asked Window Dressers to canvass the communities it works with, who reported using Outlook, Google and other shared software.

26. 1:12:00
    What the town's email licences cover

    Devin, the town's new IT staffer, explained that committee email accounts are on Exchange Online Plan 1 rather than 365, so they do not include Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Adding those runs roughly $18 per person per month against 56 email licences the town currently pays for, and there is no budget line for it, though licences could be issued only to those who need them, particularly committee members doing the most collaboration. Members suggested pressing the select board to consider it.

27. 1:17:28
    What the commission actually wants to share

    Members distinguished policy discussion, which they accepted belongs in public, from the practical work they cannot do at monthly meetings: volunteer sign-up sheets, who can work a given evening, whether the Eureka is booked, and lists of organisations offering volunteers. They also noted their emails are already public records subject to request, and that nobody had ever explained a retention schedule or what is and is not covered to them when they were issued town addresses.

28. 1:22:53
    MMA workshop and next steps on access rules

    Roberta (?) reported a Maine Municipal Association webinar, Understanding the Freedom of Access Act, on Wednesday, August 31, presented by MMA legal services attorneys and a town manager, and aimed at municipal staff, public access officers and elected and appointed officials. Some thought the full agenda was more than the commission needed, but members agreed the vocabulary alone would help and that the answer they get will otherwise vary with whoever they ask. A member also offered to ask contacts on select boards in nearby towns how they handle it.

What was decided

• 49:19
  Moved and seconded to support the conservation easement on the Colson farm and to write a resolution of support, mirroring the one the select board passed the night before, to be sent to Land for Maine's Future ahead of its board presentation around September 27. The chair called for those in favour but no count was recorded on the tape; immediately afterwards members described the commission as supporting the project and undertook to get the letter out once Adam sends the resolution in an editable form.passed
• 1:22:53
  Agreed that Roberta would circulate the Maine Municipal Association's August 31 Freedom of Access Act webinar and that at least one member would attend the open meeting portion, rather than continuing to rely on second-hand answers about what the commission may share between meetings.passed

An outcome reads "unclear" where the recording does not state it plainly. The recogniser drops short words, and "the motion does not carry" is one missing word from its opposite.

Worth knowing

• 0:09
  Rachel's service provider application to the state's Community Resilience Partnership, covering Durham, Gray and New Gloucester, is due August 15 after an extension from July 15. Durham's letter of support has already gone in, and she asked for a commission member to read the draft application before she files it.
• 49:19
  The easement on the Colsons' New Leaf Farm would cover about 74 of its 80 acres, with Maine Farmland Trust paying half the purchase price and Land for Maine's Future (?) asked for the other half. The select board voted unanimously in support the night before, and Land for Maine's Future weighs municipal support heavily; its board presentation is around September 27.
• 1:06:19
  The commission was told the Freedom of Access Act prevents it from editing shared documents outside meeting time. Members disputed this: the state's public access ombudsman would not give a straight answer, and other Maine towns running the same Window Dressers projects reported using exactly those tools.
• 1:12:00
  Committee email accounts are Exchange Online Plan 1, which does not include Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Upgrading costs roughly $18 per person per month against the 56 licences the town pays for, and no budget line exists for it.

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