Dear Friends of Boulder Knoll:
Big news from the Planning Committee meeting last Thursday!
The Planning Committee decided to go ahead and ask Friends of Boulder Knoll for a proposal for agricultural use for the area between the barn and Bob Gidding’s house. I think this is great — a reasonable scale for us to start. It’s a fairly small piece of land — they were saying about 2 acres — I think it might be more. Plenty for a volunteer group without much money or equipment to try to manage.
The timing is also fortuitous. Laura DeCaprio asked me what would be a reasonable time frame for FOBK to present a proposal, and I said late March. This gives us time to work on our goals and gather ideas, (by e-mail and at our next meeting, Feb 21 at Fellis’s house) try them out at the financial processes workshop on March 2-3, and see if they will fly financially, and then refine them before we present them late in the month.
The Planning Committee also discussed having town crews go ahead to start controlling invasive species on the site, using targeted application of herbicides by town crews from Park & Recreation. This will require a change of the Management Plan for Boulder Knoll, which I already indicated in my letter to Town Council that we would support. Milone seemed to think that the Park & Recreation crews could work on this during “windows of opportunity” – including right now, when there is not as much snow to plow as they expected. We’ll see how much of this really can be done without allocating any new budget for it, but at least they are willing to try.