CT AMC Conservation Committee

Meeting Minutes for September 14, 2005
Attendees: Jim O’Rourke, John Crist, Andrew May, Birge Dayton, Aimee Santeler, Keith Santeler, Mindy Gates

September 17 Clean Up and New Member Day Dinner

We are expecting about twelve people for the Clean up on Saturday. The group discussed details for the event. Those who want to carpool can meet at Northeast Utilities in Berlin to drive up together. Aimee will bring lunches and a camera to take pictures. We need the waiver/hike form/sign in sheet for those who volunteer to sign. Those who go should wear hiking boots and work clothes and bring gloves.

For the dinner, Mindy will bring the display, develop a sign up sheet for recruiting new members to the committee, and put together a flyer of our upcoming events. Aimee will put together a chart of our goal for getting CAN cards and photos for the display.

October and November Clean ups

Aimee was still looking into the dates for the next 2 clean ups but was going to confirm soon after the meeting. (Confirmation: The October clean up will be on Saturday, Oct 22nd at Hammonassett State Park and the November clean up will be on November 5th at Bigelow Hollow State Park. Both will be from 9am to 1pm.)

Andrew offered to put together press releases and try to get legislators to attend.

Nov 5th Annual Meeting

The group spent some time planning the breakout session for the Annual Meeting. John will follow up to see if in fact we can have a breakout session at the event. We would have 50 minutes for our session. Ideally we'd like to do a PowerPoint with pictures and information. We should have a catchy title like "Fighting for your environment!" One format that was proposed was to spend half the time on the state of the environment - 25 minutes, and the other half on the Art of Advocacy - 25 minutes. We decided we would try to get a panel of 3 people. Here are the people we identified for potential panelists: Betty Mc Laughlin, Patty from CFPA and Jim O'Rourke. Jim will follow up with the two potential panelists. Andrew had ideas for others if those cannot do it. The group discussed doing a run through of the workshop at the next Conservation Committee meeting in October.

Winter Conservation Training

The group decided a Saturday in January or February would be best for the training because it would give us more time to plan and more importantly, not conflict with all the projects going on this Fall. Birge will see which dates CFPA is available since they had offered us the site already. (After the meeting, the date was set for Saturday, February 4th and CFPA was reserved)

The committee needs to work on developing an agenda and getting speakers for this training. Mindy will take the lead on this and contact Faith Salter again to see what she can do to assist us in planning the event.

Budget

There was some discussion on the budget. Jim state that if there is money left, we should spend it. We should have about $600 left and we were given $900 for next year.

Speakers

Andrew shared some ideas for speakers for our meetings during the year. He offered to follow up with them to try and get them for our meetings.

Other

Tabling events were discussed - possible outdoor events will be the Eaglefest in February and Earth Day in the Spring

Get our Volunteer hours into either Jim or John asap.