Good afternoon, everybody. We'll give it another couple minutes. Folks are still kind of coming in. So hang tight. We'll be starting shortly.
Okay, good afternoon, everybody. EAB Task Force, September 13. We are recording. Welcome everybody. Our main goal is to hopefully everybody has a copy of the agenda that was sent out yesterday. If you did not receive it, shoot me an email. And I'll type my email in the chat right now. We're still kind of working out some kinks in the Microsoft Teams listserv. I know some folks have been able to get in some folks are getting the emails. And I think we're some folks are, we're still working on correcting some of the emails or adding folks who weren't added before. So if I have left you out, let me know. And we'll make sure to get you on there. So today, we're doing kind of an update and then giving some time for our subcommittees to give some updates. As many of them have met in the last month or so. So sure, we'll have some good discussion around that. Other housekeeping items, we are still working on getting things up on the Oregon EAP dot info website. We had initially started to post some some of our video recordings from our previous taskforce meetings. So that will be kind of our public hub. We also have the team's deal, which you will be able to find some of the meeting recordings and notes. And I know it gets a little wonky. If you're also on the state teams, you have to kind of switch back and forth. So if folks have any issues, let me know I'm still myself a team's rookie. So if you have any points or advice, feel free to shoot those my way as well. Okay, I think we're gonna start kick it off to rob.
Yeah, I think you've got chat and reactions muted on this.
Okay, thank you. Sure. I will figure out how to turn those on here. Very shortly, while Chris and Wyatt talk but Chris Benjamin Oda and Dr. Williams from
odf.
Give a little recap about where we're at.
Sure. Thank you, Patrick. No problem on the figuring that out. I didn't notice that myself. So thank you, Robert, for pointing that out. So good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our third taskforce meeting. I think I see a lot of familiar faces. And I'm pretty sure that we have some new folks who have joined us since our last meeting, as we've all had conversations on our respective subcommittees and being reached out to by new persons who are interested. That's been part of the ongoing process is making like Patrick was saying, making sure everyone's getting on the listserv, updating our listserv as needed, as we have new folks joining. So again, thank you for joining if you're new. So if you had a chance to check on the agenda that was provided by Patrick think he sent that out yesterday, today really is the focus is really just to kind of hear from our subcommittees and see where we're at. But I did want to start off real quick just to recap, an opportunity that odf had presented with ODA, to speak to their board of forestry, don't need to get into the details about what we talked about, unless why you want to give a recap. But really, it was just to really reiterate where we're at how we got here, what we know what we don't know, and precisely the actions that we've taken immediately. So a lot of those things are items that we've already covered in our previous meetings. But I just wanted to commend odf on a great job, and also on the responsiveness of the board. So that was really what I just wanted to share with everyone was the board of forestry was extremely supportive. For one they give big kudos to everyone on the task force all the various subcommittees and are really impressed with the amount of work that we've done already in such a short amount of time. And they really just wanted to iterate their support to this effort. You know, just letting us know that they're there if we need them to kind of back us up in any way. So that was just heartening, I think to hear from that. And Scott and Wyatt, were both there at that meeting. So I don't know if either of you want to chime in with anything on that note.
I would just say that they, as with the wildfire situation, really stressed the importance. And we're grateful for the proactive approach and utilizing that best tools and technologies to do deal with this threat. And in the same way that that approach has worked with wildfire, defense or protection. It's serving as well with EAB efforts for just thinking ahead. And kudos to the team, who six plus years ago, we're putting these preparations together. So
I just want to say thanks, Chris, for coming and joining us. And for those of you don't know the board of forestry, provides oversight and direction for the Oregon Department of Forestry. They are volunteer appointed by the governor. And so they're pretty high level, they provide direction and approve policy. And so they had a lot of interest in questions. It was about 15 minutes of presentation and another 15 minutes. And a lot of the questions centered around private landowners, and how to replant following ash destruction. So we have our work cut out for us at Oregon Department, forestry, OSU and some of the other partners on finding the replaceable tree species. And the other thing I want to say is Oda will have the quarantine authority. But then odf has the rules in statute for harvesting ash. And so there are already some growers and some forest product companies out there interested in utilizing ash. And that will fall under our Oregon Department of Forestry laws for horse practices. But yeah, thanks again, Chris, for joining us that day.
As they will give you kudos to you why you did a great job in presenting. So thank you for that. So unless there any other questions, we'll move on to the next agenda item I just wanted to update update the group on that. So to say preemptively, well done. So next, just to recap, so again, purpose of today is just to hear updates from our various subcommittees. So just as a reminder, or again, if you are new. We previously created four sub, excuse me seven subcommittees, ranging from various topics, so we have our surveying and monitoring group. With the function of creating survey tools, making recommendations facilitating data sharing of ongoing detections and trapping, we ever comms Communications Subcommittee with the task of creating our communications plan sharing and delivering key messages, which are kind of helped create it and identify by the task force as a group, our steering committee or the other subcommittees. And that is kind of the key point between the information that we want to share with the media and the public or other interested groups. We have a research subcommittee so for identifying and prioritizing research key questions and objectives, so like why it just mentioned this question on the kind of ecological aspect of what are we going to do about replanting? And what are the replant Lee plantable species once we have ash no longer able to be in certain ecosystems? What are we going to do with that? That's definitely a question for the research group, or wood waste and utilization for identifying creating pathways of treatment, removal disposal of infested in the suspected suspect infested wood, seeking alternatives for said wood usage, or IPM group for creating and addressing questions about how are we going to implement certain practices and kind of curating references and library resources that we can then share with our other interested parties or the public, our training and tech assistance for implementing training or in and creating training opportunities for a wide range of audiences that we have interested in the ongoing EAB issue and of course funding. So identifying funding sources for both government and for other other entities. So if you have the agenda, again, that's kind of recapping what I just said. And we have identified the lead for each subcommittee, their email is on that agenda. So if you hear if you're new, or if you didn't have a chance to before and you're interested in joining a subcommittee, again, I encourage you to reach out to one of the leads in volunteer for your time to participate in any of these ongoing initiatives. So that's all I had to say, just recapping all of that. And with that, I think we can go ahead and jump into our updates from our various subcommittees. So we were going to by request, we're going to start with our survey, a monitoring group. And the lead for that is Cody whole house with Oda.
Awesome, thanks, Chris. Yeah, it's been a pretty productive last couple of weeks for the survey and detection subcommittee. I'll do my best to relay everything that's been worked on. There's a lot of different people involved. And I have several people that I've become familiar with. And you hear a lot about them today. But I hope that in future meetings, I'll get better at some of our local agency updates, we have a lot of different smaller agencies that are on the ground, helping some more larger agencies. And so I'll get better at highlighting in the future. If you get left out today, I apologize. But we'll we'll continue to grow that way. But I kind of wanted to break down some are updates about what we have been doing, and then what we're planning to be doing. So that's kind of the two breakdowns today. And then within each of those categories, I'm going to have kind of updates by program. And so I've got updates for my crew here at the Oregon Department of Ag. I'll have a few updates for those at Oregon Department of Forestry. And then my other major lead in my subcommittee is Robert Emanuel working with Clean Water Services. And he's got my liaison for many other people that are on the ground in Forest Grove area and some of the surrounding Washington County organizations. So yeah, if I forget anything today, Robert, or Wyatt or Christine or my other people, Max, Tom, let me know. But I think I'd like to start with Clean Water Services first, because they've been doing a lot of the legwork for us. So what have they been up to? Like the others that I'll talk about today, we've all been using the survey 123 app to go ahead and log data on ash trees that are in not only the Ground Zero Forest Grove area, but in some of the surrounding areas in Washington County as well. And that data is continuing to build and I will go into the dashboard in a few minutes here and talk about that as well and more specifics. But Robert Emanuel is heading up this group and leading quite a few different people, not only in survey work, but in education as well and securing permissions from many different property owners and working with Jeff Merrill from Portland Metro, who is one of the chief scientists there that is granting us permission and access to some of the properties that Metro owns, along with several other property owners. Speaking of the training efforts that have gone on, there was a training effort on August 25, that Clean Water Services as well as Oregon Department of Forestry was able to participate in and put on where they actually had 36 Different organizations represented and a total of 40 individuals that were We're actually in participation on that date, which is really awesome. And a lot of people are being impacted by that kind of work. And it sounds like the target target audience being industry leaders, arborists, people who are on the ground that actually are talking to the public on the day to day about what to do with ash trees that may or may not be afflicted with infestation, and how to plan for future infestation and how to survey. So a lot of first detector type training that's going on there. And I want to give a huge kudos to Robert Emanuel. Why it Williams, Christine Buel, others that have been helping put that training on. They also have another training that's coming up September 16, one to 4pm at Joseph Gallo elementary Park, which is ground zero where he had first detection. And so that's something to reach out to us about if you have interest in. I don't know if Robert, if that's an open invitation, but at least if anyone has questions about how you're doing that training, I imagine you'd be able to relay them tips and tricks on what you're including in content, etc.
Well, actually, I'd love to refer him to both Alex and Brandy seyval Brandy with the Tualatin soil water conservation district, Randy Lawrence, my colleague and Alex who's been helping out on the OSU side, they've really been holding down the the trainings. And the trainings are aimed particularly at professionals to get the initial survey data out there. These are folks who would be primed to use the survey 123 instrument that Max developed. So versus the general public, Oregon forest pest detector type audience, I know Alex has been doing more in that realm with woodland owners and arborists, etc. But what we're trying to do is focus on cities in the immediate Forest Grove region. And folks that we work with frequently to manage wild ash habitat, because they will be most likely to have the time and the knowledge and the motivation to do initial survey work. And we're Clean Water Services and 12 NSW CD or paying them a little bit of extra project management money, if they are an operator of some kind, to do a wandering survey while they're out in the field. The idea is that we get these much more professionalized on the ground first. And to feed you, particularly, you know, the ODA folks and the dashboard, the most high quality data we can in the immediate vicinity. But we we are interested in getting the public and others involved in any professionals on this call, who want to come to that are absolutely welcomed is there's no no holds barred on, and I'll be there Friday as well. So I've done a lot of credit, I think needs to go to the 12 tennis to BCD. And to OSU in particular for organizing these trainings. With with the everybody's help out there. So it's quite a quite a quite a full court press.
Yeah, absolutely. I would definitely second on those kudos there. Thank you for mentioning those other names Robert. So if anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out to us on that training. I know Tom Valenti, who is also part of our subcommittee has voiced interest in collaboration with the other committees that have anything to do with training and making sure we get supplies shared where it's needed. Tom Valenti, again, is also creating some shadow box type materials that you could actually look at and see, you know, chips or samples of bark that have galleries in them larval instar, kind of feeding patterns, things like that. So if you wanted to have any kind of teaching materials that are physical, that you could use for any training, reach out to us on that as well, we might have some stuff for you. So yeah, and then we'll, we can go on and on, we have a few more items that I want to touch on with Clean Water Services. But we'll talk about that. I think when we're talking about where we're going to next steps planning for the future. That's what I think they've been up to in a large way in the past several weeks. Oregon Department of Forestry, like I said, has been kind of working in tandem there with some of their workshops and training efforts, as well as contributing more data to the survey 123 app. And thank you very much to your team for doing that. As you'll see in a moment. We've got a lot more data coming in. And as far as the ODA what we've been up to we've also been cataloging using the survey 123 app getting more and more ash information out there. And we have a few new detection sites that we have found around for scroll, but I'll show you those in a moment. We've also been looking for potential biological control sites and locations. That's kind of a sub sub part of our committees. There's also efforts into bio control. I won't get into that as much right now, it's kind of a can of worms. We've had other cities reach out to us city of Eugene, Washington Parks Department both have asked to use our survey 123 app. So we have potentially some other people getting involved, and that Ash tree inventory as well. Yeah, that's a lot of what we've been up to. And I know that we've had people responding like Tom and Max to invasive species hotline, notifications, where we potentially have a site that might have exit holes or any other infestation, signs and a tree. And we've been going and checking those listings quite regularly as well. As far as the APHIS crew, that's a part of our group, USDA APHIS. They've been out in the Portland metro area, as well as Forest Grove with traps and surveying efforts, I would say they have some of the wider scope. And using the survey 123 app, which is good, we're kind of getting an understanding of ash trees outside of Ground Zero outside of Forest Grove. And there, yeah, inventory in those ash trees, and also getting us potentially some trapping supplies for next year. We're working on ordering some supplies through them, so that we're ready for next spring, and possible efforts of trapping that go on. At this time, I wanted to show you a few updates on the dashboard. I don't know if you can see my screen there. I'm going to assume you can. So as of right now you can see the Forest Grove area and all these diamond shaped little symbols are where we've had inspections go on looking at ash trees. Recently, Max ragas. Zeno, who's one of the entomologists on our crew has updated some of the symbology here and Max, correct me if I'm wrong here, but we've gotten rid of any green symbology. To our now you can only see yellow, which is suspect, or red colors that indicate actual detections, positive detections of the insect. And as far as interesting news, and it's an update,
honey, could you blow it up a little bit? There you go. Yeah, it's a little hard to see the screen. Thank you.
Yeah, Joseph Gale Elementary is ground zero for us. You can see some of the red dots above it two blocks to the north and apartment complexes where we originally found some at Meadowlark apartments as well. And as we zoom out, we're starting to get other positive showing up in the last month or so. I know Tom Valenti and others went to Pacific University and found several infested trees at Pacific University you can see here is not too far away from Joseph yellow Elementary. And then they also went down Tom and crew to Gales Creek. I'm not sure if I'm gonna get the river name to show up there. But this little bend and Gales Creek is another site where on a natural stand of ash, they actually have an infestation. And you can actually see some pictures of some galleries that they are viewing in the branches there. So that's big news, as well as we get, you know, natural stance kind of involved in this story. Another one to note is just north of some of the original ground zero initial infestation is Bard park where Jessica Rendon and Max ragas. Zeno also found some exit holes all over the trunk of a very mature Oregon ash there and Bard Park. So you know, fairly centralized still, but we are seeing new sites come up and natural stands of ash. And that one's a considerable distance here from Joseph Gale. So yeah, I don't think it's quite as isolated as we thought two or three weeks ago. But that's some of the update there. And we have updated data coming in every day. So definitely reach out. If you want access to this information, we can share this kind of dashboard with you on the regular. Yeah, let me bring my notes back up here.
And as far as where we're going in the future, I know I'm running a little long here. I apologize with a lot of updates for you. Clean Water Services really wants to target the one mile radius around our ground zero. So more focused Forest Grove inspections. And I have a map here that I can actually show you that Robert provided me. Let me go ahead and share the map I can actually get it to do that.
You need help Cody I can pull mine up to
thanks I think I should be able to get it here. I just want to make sure that when does the right size
yeah okay, there we go
great. I don't know if everyone has seen this PDF map says wild ash surveys focus area. If you are you can see that Robert Emanuel has kindly drawn a yellow highlighter, kind of polygon around some of these areas that are going to really see a lot of intensive effort out of the Clean Water Services Group and some of the other local groups on the ground that are working with Robert. You can see that they're working on riparian corridors along Gales Creek, the Tualatin river. And these include, and correct me if I'm wrong here, Robert Penstemon Hill, Fern Hill it's I think it's forest Gales, Forest Grove
partners, and yeah,
so there's Peltzman prairie, which is down in the southwest corner. In the north, to the northeast, there is Fernhill wetlands, which is a clean water property. Many of these properties are owned by Metro and I know Jeff Merrill's on the call. I don't know if Rob's on the call as well. But you know, there's a lot of Metro, a lot of Clean Water Services public in here that's available for survey, and then carpenter Creek gales Forest Grove, a property we call zerker, which has a lot of wild ash on it. And then marine ponds, and then some not listed here. But in some cases outline there are some working lands that are where permissions need to be managed by the Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District that are adjacent riparian areas. But these are large, extensive ash populations directly adjacent to the infested area that we know about different age class stands, high densities, lots of trees with different signs and symptoms, mostly of other forms of stress, but potentially EAB, as well. And this area really gives us kind of a good snapshot of wild ash populations. In the immediate vicinity, there's also ash populations, obviously, to the north of Forest Grove. And to those red, I just now outlined a couple of major points, from survey recently, to show you the kind of the area that would be both in and outside of that survey zone. But to the north, you also have counsel Creek and some creeks flowing into there, which will also eventually become part of this survey. So but just wanted to give you a sense, these are areas where there's multiple opportunities for easy access for multiple types of survey, including dropping a tree or taking upper limbs in the crown, and for eventually doing EAB bio control releases as well. And Cody, I just want to let you know, you had a question too. Somebody's got their hand up.
Okay, yeah, feel free to voice that question. Whoever that is.
It's me. It's Karen Ripley. I just wonder, I think the trap it's the time has come that the traps should have been collected? Is there data on the different trapping efforts that you can report?
That's a good question. I'd have to probably defer you to Mariah who's had the most of the traps out? I don't know. We talked about traps and ordering new traps last week, but I may be missing out on any data reported for those yet.
No eaab have been found in any of the traps.
Thanks, Maria. Thank you. Awesome. So there's a little bit more intricacy on some of that more targeted area where Clean Water Services and other sister groups are going to be working again within that more one mile buffer around ground zero. Tyler Peterson who is working on the invasive species coordinator for a toilet and soil water conservation group will also be doing is possibly looking at a two mile radius and some efforts there as well. Tyler Peterson like I mentioned and Laura trunk are both integrally involved and some of these survey projects that are going forward, as well as I believe. I'm blanking on the name here. It was I think, Bethany. I'm so bad with names. I apologize. Hopefully next time, we'll have more of those listed for you. But again, a lot of people involved with Roberts efforts there, and we're working forward on more of that survey effort and the local area. And yeah, I think I'm gonna skip on to there wasn't a kilometer that
Bethany Lund Cody, she is with the Tualatin soil water conservation district as well.
Thank you. Yeah. Bethany Alana, appreciate that. I did have an interesting note here from Robert, that he has been in the works, I don't know if he's already passed these out. But he's in the process of creating and disseminating permission slips that are given to landowners that talk about what involvement they want to have in the project, and what potentially would go on if they were involved in our surveys and other efforts. And so if you are interacting with private property, landowners, I encourage you to reach out to us on that topic as well. I think Robert could lend a hand on any messages that need to be created there. Yeah. Go ahead, Robert.
I'm just gonna refer folks to Tyler, Tyler Patterson is he is handling those on behalf of the Soil and Water Conservation District. They have the local landowner relationships and permits of entry for a lot of those community members, and want to manage the permissions and access.
Great. Thank you, Robert. Yeah, and then as far as what's being planned on the ODA side, we will continue to do our surveying and responses to hotline, reports and things like that. I will let Jake go on more detail on this. I don't know if Jake, you want to do this now or later. But we are planning to do an in house training for Oda staff that will be facilitated by APHIS USDA, later in the month to act as kind of a reinforcement of site selection, and tree sampling and other field related skills led by several different leaders within the USDA APHIS crew.
Yeah, so Katie, summarize that, we're going to have two trainings one in the fall, which will be in a couple of weeks, next week or so two weeks, and then one in the spring, which would be a larger scope. So the one in the spring will be trying to pull in Washington and California, and give a much larger training on that two cooperators. But the one occurring in two weeks, as Cody mentioned, is gonna be much smaller for everybody to get their bearings on how this is going to work. What we talk through when people are out in the field and what they're looking at, and kind of what the tree is telling us, as we escaped through that, as well as to land ownership, permissions, scraping trees, going through all those steps for bio control. So this is more of our first run through it. And then we'll be opening it up in the spring for a larger audience.
Yeah, and I think that will be very insightful. I'm excited to get our people on the ground later this month to work with those from APHIS. It'll be interesting as we do possibly some sampling of branches and other trunk samples, we'll probably learn more about some of these natural riparian stands as well ourselves. So yeah, I look forward to that. Yeah, and as far as on the ground work, we kind of have two full plans. We're hoping that potentially a smaller crew of some of our seasonal trappers may be able to stay on at the end of this season, and work with some of the leadership from our Japanese beetle eradication team on potentially just looking at visual surveys of ash during the winter, to get a better idea of some of the extent again, of the infestation levels on some of our natural riparian ash tans. And so that's still in the works, as well as plans for a spring effort to actually set up trapping D limitation. I need to work with Kerry on ordering some traps from Ryan APHIS crew. But we're hoping to potentially do actual group of emerald ash borer or trappers that would go out next spring. Again, that's in the works, but something that we'd like to do, given funding availability and other things like that. So we talked a little bit about that as a committee as well. And I know that Mariah has generously offered support with via personnel and other supplies to that effort in the spring as well and of that Something that you feel like you had a group of people that might be interested in that the spring, please reach out to us on that as well. Yeah, I think that's a lot of that I again, I talked about the idea that Tom is creating teaching materials. So reach out to us for that. I don't have as much here in the way of Oregon Department of Forestry as far as what they have planned in the next few weeks. But I, from what I understand, they've been very involved with surveying continuously for Ash like we have, and supporting a lot of these training efforts. And if Christine is here, and has any other updates, or why you feel free to interject those now, but I think that's a large part of what we've been working on as a subcommittee, and I can stop talking now. I appreciate the time.
Thank you, Cody. Hey, just a quick tech update. I've gone through just about every option and setting and three dot menu there is and I'm not finding anything about the chat. So I'm going to keep looking. But it looks like the reactions are up. I've seen some people raise hands. So let's use that for now. are focusing the q&a deal at all. Maybe we can use that if folks want questions on the side. So I'll keep looking into it. But thanks for your patience.
For the for the team's chat. That's something that I don't think you can change once the meeting has begun. I think that needs to happen before the before the meetings hosted.
Perfect. Thank you, doctor. I will make sure it's up for the next one. But it looks like some people are able to see chat. So anyways, next up, we have the Communications Committee. Jim, thanks so
much for that. I'm gonna interrupt. Sorry, Chris, you wanted to say?
Yeah, why? No.
I just wanted to say yeah, for a survey. Thanks, Cody odf does have a handful of traps up in the area. Those will be checked before the end of September. And we'll report back on that. And then just want to say thanks for the survey tool. And for future trapping, too. For next year. We have a bare bones organization for trappers compared to ODA, and we're still defaulting as Oda as the lead agency on this. So my opinion is that we can help fill in the gaps. If you know areas where you might need some assistance, we have some plans to to hire, or have some funds shifted to other positions to help out. So just keep that in mind that odf is here to fill in the gaps for trapping next year.
Great. That's excellent. Thank you, Wyatt.
Okay, sorry, Jim. Go ahead, go for it. That's communications.
Yes, communication. So been spending a lot of last few weeks trying to identify liaisons to the communications subgroup, from the different agencies so that they have a person who can help vet stuff and bring forward information somewhat like what we're hearing today. The meeting that the next meeting of that group is the 19th, where I want to present what I've received from the overall communication plan, we've sent that out to the liaisons in that group that have been identified to date didn't get a lot of response. But there were, you know, a few tweaks to that. Probably the biggest one was whether we wanted to have a list of resource links in the communication plan itself, which we could, but we need to know sort of, what are the links that people valid are validating as Yep, this is this is a good link to have on there. So once we meet on the night team, what I'd like to do is sort of say, is everybody happy with the communication plan? Can we now send it out to the broader group and say, this is basically the blueprint for how we how we are planning to move forward a living document? So if, if, when that broader group receives it, and they think, hey, you know, I just noticed or we've got this or what about that? It's not too late to let us know. And we can make adjustments and take him back into the committee, weigh those and see if there's any reason not to make those changes, but so that should be coming following week. The other items that we created, were an audience map for use by the agencies to be able to say, who's reaching out to arborist who's reaching out to urban forestry professionals, within municipalities who's reaching out to homeowners in various locations, and so is who's reaching out to the nursery industry. So it might say, for example, well, nursery owners that's going to be Oda as the primary communicator. In some cases like Lando There's, well there's a number of people that might be reaching out to them, depending on whether they have an actual area or they're just a homeowner with with with some stuff. So as anyone sees that map and says, Well, I'm going to be communicating to this audience we want to track. What was that communication in this spreadsheet so that we can kind of know, oh, Oda is reaching out to them for in this occasion, ODF is reaching out on a totally different matter, but still talking about EAB matters. So that we can kind of say, well, gee, these people are getting, you know, are they getting four or five, six communications from seven different agencies? Or is there a way that maybe we should be consolidating some of that, so they're getting it in a combined communication? So it's not just here, look out for this. And then the next thing they know is, hey, if you're going to harvest timber, here's another sheet of paper, can we can we sort of think about our audiences and think, Well, what is it that they need to know about EAB regardless of sort of which agency may be, thinks they should know that, if possible. So that's the purpose of having that kind of a map. And then also Dynegy. We haven't nobody's communicated to this one group that doesn't seem like any agency is, is communicating to them. So we want to sometimes highlight that and say, well, has anybody thought about this group? Is there a communication plan for them? The The other thing is a timeline. And listening to this has been kind of interesting, because the, in a communications mind set we last communication the public really had in a general sense was the bugs are flying, report them, if they look like this, report them it's a green insect. And we were interested in that. And if you see ash declining report that, well, they're still getting reports we understand of insects being reported when when in fact, emerald ash borer adults are no longer flying. So it seems like the natural communication point now is to update people to say, you don't have to worry about reporting green insects because they're not gonna be adult emerald ash borer is if they're flying around right now, they're not emerald ash borer. So however, if your ash are still decline, if you if you see declines, that would be an occasion to report that and we may come out, have people look at it, if you can do the self reporting, that's great. Or we have as as you were just saying, Cody, there are people that can come out and look at suspected trees if they get reported. So we are thinking the fire communication took up most of the oxygen in the room. So we kind of waiting for that to die down. But I think the time here in the last part of September is good to have another communication generally to the broader community saying the following. Thanks for people reporting earlier this summer. Now is the time of year when the emerald ash borer adults are gone. Everything is really happening inside the trees over the winter. The good news is that natural spread by insects flying of emerald ash borer is not happening over the winter. So we have a little bit of time, the real risk for spread now is really going to be human caused moving firewood. So the insects themselves are pretty much in place for winter. And I'm what the entomologists on this call to verify that what I'm saying is accurate. But by and large, the concern in fall and winter, after the adults are not flying around anymore, is movement of the wood. And that's how the larva are going to get around to other locations to emerge in the spring. So that would allow us to bring in the message about so don't report adults do report ash trees that are declining, and don't move firewood, kind of the three key messages, and then get ready and get trained because in the spring, that's when we will again see the emergence of these insects. So we think communication now in the fall would kind of reassure people that hey, we haven't forgot about this there are people working on it. And we can then list and I was making some notes there Cody with some of this stuff is over the winter, we want to sort of say bullet form. There will be trainings, variety of trainings this fall in this spring, for arborists and other interested professionals who work with trees to help them learn how to identify this. And so contact the EAB information page which brings me to my next point is we have worked on Patrick and feel free to weigh in here but OASC it was suggested the Oregon invasive species Council could be host to a EAB information, general webpage about everything related to webpage for the general public to go to and find past news releases. They could find these trainings sessions if they're open to the public and you want people to attend, they could find the fact sheets, they could find any videos that people put out, or some of the existing videos, they would find the emerald ash borer lookalikes and those kinds of tools and resources, so tools, resources, background information, news releases, etc. And it would all be under an EAB website with one URL that anybody in any agency could could give out. It doesn't preclude Oda or odf, having their own webpage and their own information there. Because some people will think to go to OTA as a lead agency, others might be more familiar with odf. And they're gonna go there. But if for people who are not like, I don't know who to contact, here's www Oregon EAB dot info. And they'll get there and it'll come up. And it won't be, I have to search down through three or four other topics before I get to the end section. It'll be coming up directly with here's your end information. And, and we would ask people, as they have updates to that information, to let us know. And the the idea would be that the OASC webmaster would then take that and keep that current as people flow that information so that the communications working group could kind of you know, serve to say, Okay, we've got the fact sheet, people want to make changes. How does you know is everybody agreed those are the right changes, then we can say, yep, this was approved. And then boom, the webmaster says, Great, we got it updated. So that the flow of information is kind of from your technical and scientific and research committees. The communications committee then sort of gets that and sort of packages it. And then OASC publishes it on their webpage, as appropriate. And that way, if anybody's like, Well, where do I go to get more information, you can just direct them to that one website, and it won't change. Whether it's fall or spring or summer, doesn't matter who put out the release, it'll be up there. So whether it's an Oda release, or an odf, or a joint release, it would be centrally housed. A couple of things on the let's talk about like, what would unfold as communications, we talked about September, with that sort of catching people up with where we are now? And what are the messages for the next several months included in that? I think, at the point at which Oda designates a quarantine zone, that's going to be a public interest hasn't happened yet. And Chris, I don't know if you have any sense of that, or Cody. But when that happens, I think that would probably be a prompt for us to generate some kind of announcement that says, you know, this portion of Washington County is now in a quarantine. What does that mean? Who does it affect?
What what do you need to know if you're in the zone or traveling through it or any of those, those things. So that could be a discreet communication, probably accompanied by a map of where the outline of that quarantine zone is maybe issued by ODA, but I think, again, posted on OASC. And hopefully, other agencies would also link to that. And then I'm hearing a lot about the spring, and I think we should be planning on some time. Whenever you know, the entomologist tell us that, okay, the bugs typically will emerge, I don't know, first of April, 20, March, whatever, ahead of that. That's when we put out the we're expecting the emergence of these insects, you might start to see them flying around. So here's kind of our spring message is, if we want people to really be observant and alert and and trying to report those, how do you do that? Get the look like things refreshed for people, if there's any other trainings that are for the general public, or if there's online resources or videos they can do, so that we get that awareness out there. That would also be a time for us to say, well, we've been busy over the winter, you know, we've trained 150 people, we could give kind of the here's what happened over the winter while you weren't paying attention. Now that maybe EAB is going to be a little more, you know, prevalent in your mind or top of mind. Know that we have been working. No there, let's say is a quarantine zone, in effect, remind people about the Don't Move Firewood, and then give them that sort of? Yes. Here's the spring AB there is a annual urban forestry conference that the Oregon Community trees puts on in Portland in June. And this Friday, they're going to meet to decide if they want to focus that around. Emerald Ash Borer in which case that reaches around 100 different people and municipal forestry and utility arborist and others. So a good audience for us to really dive deep into that, so we may be reaching out to the different agencies to get panelists and others, and potentially could even record some of those sessions. And then those could be posted. Because they are designed, although they're kind of designed on a more specific level, they, their audiences generally have a lot of good questions. It still is of interest for people that couldn't make it in person to have those. So we may be reaching out to different people to talk about issues around because it's a six or eight hour. Yeah, it's about six or seven hours. There's time in there to talk about wood waste utilization. The impacts on you know, what about the natural areas. So Rob's familiar with that conference. So we're thinking some panel discussions and some other things. So more to come on that that wanted to just kind of put that on people's calendars. It's usually held up at the World forestry center. And I think that's where it'll begin this year. Register guard didn't pardon, Rob.
Go ahead. No, I just want to say, Jim, I assume you're going to tap into a bunch of taskforce members for speakers who kind of got your ready made speaker group right here.
Well, I have to have to clear this by the Education Conference Committee for Oregon committee trees, and then they will start the process of outreaching. But yes, many of the people in this call will probably get tapped to do that. Yeah. So that's why he was kind of alerting people that don't be surprised if you get asked to be you know, a speaker or be on a panel. The other Eugene register guard. There reporter Adam du Vernay has kind of been interested in EAB, and was kind of wanting to know about the seed collecting project if that was coming toward the end. And so I had talked to him about it. And he got more interested watch the video online and interviewed Wyatt Williams today, and is planning to interview Richardson ESCO, if he hasn't already about what is going to happen with the million or so ash seeds of Oregon ash that were collected under the federal grant, and are going to be planted out and tested at least a portion of those. And so that's a very long range. That's not something unique, anybody's kind of immediately gonna take action on. But long range, it's over the next 20 years potentially, where we find that there might be pockets or reservoirs of genetic resistance that could be utilized to bring Oregon ash back. So I think when we talk to the community, we want to let them know there's this kind of immediate, the crisis of it kind of coming out into the in arriving in Oregon spreading out infecting trees in various communities that will kind of roll out as that happens in the next few years. Longer term, though, there was long range thinking, thanks to the partnership with the federal government to try and preserve this gene pool and then test for resistance. So we're taking both? What are the short term actions that need to be done? You know, let's find it find out where it is, find out how fast it's spreading, then let's sort of make sure communities are prepared, and will continue to hit that message in the appropriate venues. Let's make sure people are trained to know how to identify it, and then they know what to do with it when it is there. And then longer term, are we working on anything to try and deal with that. And I would put in that bucket some of the biological controls that APHIS is doing. So if there's going to be a release of biological controls in Washington County, with Jake and others on there, we would love to know that on the Communications Committee, because we think we can probably promote that with some say television stations going out as you release those in the wild. That's a visual opportunity. And I think it shows people that hey, stuff is being done here. We're not just throwing up our hands and letting it go. We're trying these parasitic wasps and things not necessarily to eradicate but to try and, you know, slow the spread or whatever the appropriate words are there. So those kinds of things we'd like to know in advance so we can plan that in our communications plan to say, Okay, here's a media opportunity, who should we invite? Where's it going to be? Is it just the Portland area media? Is there an opp maybe would be interested in that as well. So we can kind of coordinate with the agency that's doing the work with the landowners are where that's places so we can get permissions and then maybe have people go out and accompany it kind of like a you know, Oregon Field Guide doing this science. You know, the state and federal and local governments cooperating in this kind of pest science as it were. So that's a lot in short time, so sorry. Go on, but those are our thoughts at this point. So got a question from Robert looks like.
Yeah, quick, quick question for a year long range too. Don't Don't forget to put in there about replacement strategies, ecological management strategies, especially wild ash populations, but I'm thinking also your cultivated street trees, Park trees, things like that. But yeah, I know that. I think there's you and Scott. But no, no.
I mean, though, we've had Scott and I have had those conversations. And you're absolutely right. I think the response comes down to there's what do you do with the removal? And then there's also now what do you put in there? I know, that's been a big issue for you, folks. And I know, there's been some technical discussions about what are the appropriate species to replant with? You know, is it in what is the mix? And does it depend on site? And can you do it, you know, is 60% of the replacements can be this? Or do we want to mix it up even more because of the concern about, you know, just replacing one monoculture with another, we're going to need the technical people to come to agreement about that, if possible, or consensus, because before we start saying, oh, you should plant this, we want to make sure that there is agreement in the botanical and riparian restoration communities that yeah, those are, those would be appropriate. If a town wanted to do that they would be within the realm of agreed, appropriateness.
We're working on that we started a group already between the two local partners that are kind of leading the soil water conservation district and Clean Water Services. My colleague, Jeff, on the call here, too, I plan to involve him. He knows that's coming, I hope. And there's others out there, I assume we're probably going to be touching base with folks that, like Dan, and Alex and others in the OSU realm, too. So don't don't that's already started. And I think the key ingredient here is to talk if we're going to be talking to the public, and it feels very doom and gloom, like one possibility is to talk about resilience. What is resilience in a forest ecosystem? What kinds of crisis and opportunities do you have?
Yeah, I mean, this is disturbance and forests have experienced other kinds of disturbances.
Trees for urban landscapes, too.
Yeah, that's exactly right. Floods can take out an area and sometimes you can replace with what was there before? And other times? Maybe it's too wet to put, you know, the what was there before? So? Yeah, that's a good thought. And Alex from LSU.
Yeah, I hate to be that guy. But I just want to remind everyone, now we're down to like five minutes for the remaining subcommittees. And we still got, like four to go, five to go to just just wanted to
be done. They're just hands went up.
Okay, I think I think that's right. Thank you, Alex, for that for that prompt. Definitely don't want to cut anybody out. But we also do want to be respectful of everyone's time and try to keep to our agenda as much as possible. So with that, I think if there's anyone, maybe this was a connected topic, if there's anyone from the research committee that would like to provide an update, and then we can move forward. I know that Dave Shaw was kind of acted as our lead, but he is unavailable. I know he's out off in Alaska, I think right now. But I'm not sure if he nominated anyone else to speak up on his behalf or otherwise, if not, we can move on to the wood waste and utilization group.
Think Alex will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that we are maybe maybe why I don't think that we had a designated speaker for the research subcommittee, as far as I know. And also correct me if I'm wrong. The most that we've had is David sent out a document to all of us with some preliminary research ideas that we've had the opportunity to edit. It's been uploaded into the team site, which that thank Patrick for getting that all set up. And I've been going in and putting some comments and edits in there. And I think we're still in that process and we'll be convening upon Dave's return.
That sounds good. Thank you, Thomas. And of course, research doesn't happen overnight. Expect that you're gonna come to the table with all the solutions.
Also was one day we'll be back next week. So I'm sure once he gets back, research that he can hit the ground running.
Great. Thank you, Alex. Okay, with that I think we can move on to our next subcommittee. So would waste utilization So you weren't.
Yeah, that's me. i Why Williams odf. And I just want to say thanks. It's amazing to see all the people working behind the scenes, with a lot of passion, a lot of time. And I know that you're getting a ton of pressure from your constituents and your clients. And it's just amazing to be sitting here seeing all this come together. So we did have a meeting for the wood waste, and wood, some sharing the wrong the wood waste wood utilization on August 23. And I want to thank everyone who joined, I think there's 17 people that joined again, a lot of passionate people, a lot of really good ideas. And I just want to cut since we're short on time, we did lay out some really good guidelines, because there's a lot of published information out there, we didn't have to recreate the wheel. But if I may, I've already heard this mentioned today on the call that there's essentially an active period, or the adults are flying. So as about April 1 through September 30. That varied a little bit, but this was the consensus among all the materials that the team reviewed. So this is active period, this is just general guidelines, it doesn't have anything to do with quarantines per se but that's when you should really avoid removing ash at that time. Or if you do have to remove it, then to chip it is the best way or to get it covered. process that safe facility. And then there's this dormant period, which we're about ready to approach right now October 1 through March 31. And that's when you can work on ash in a safe manner and transport it. And then there's some approved treatment options right here. And again, this is a synthesis of several different standards that we reviewed, and that is processing the Word to create a bark free and removing the sapwood. to theirs. This is where there's some conflict but one inch would be the best. So removed the bark and one inch of the sapwood. Grinding or chipping to one inch in any two dimensions heat treatment 140 degrees Fahrenheit or 60 degrees for 60 minutes. Incineration that's air curtain and open burning burial at least 12 inches of topsoil. I guess emerald ash borer can crawl through 11 inches of topsoil, so make sure it's 12 inches, composting again 140 degrees for four days. And then secondary processing to produce wood products such as paper or fiberboard wood pellets. And then, so I sent this to Chris and Patrick to so we don't have to go through all the the nuts and bolts. But if someone wants to move ash material out of the quarantine area, what other states have done is set up a compliance agreement with regulatory agencies. And so again, this is all spelled out, we didn't have to re re redo the wheel here. But the material again, there's that safe period when they can move out of the quarantine and then they have to be processed. I don't really want to go into all this right here because I want to cut to some Chase, cut to the chase down here utilization options for ash wood. These are things that we've all discussed and probably thought about, but the products can be lumber, wood chips, boiler, fuel, firewood and then other non traditional products such as biochar wood pellets, and we go through and list how should those products be treated to lumber should be kiln dried, or if it's kiln dried and square edge, then it's exempt from regulations. Green lumber can only leave the quarantine under compliance agreement. Wood chips against a one inch by one inch. already talked about heat treatment disposal options. So that's for making products for disposal. Your the options are disposed on landfill, air curtain incinerator and open burning. And I included in my package to Oda and Patrick, some of the references but there are more we reviewed maybe six or seven different references there. And the best one by far was the one from Canada. So unlike the US, Canada still has a nationwide regulation program for EAB. And so this is the most up to date that I can find comprehensive best management practices for slowing the spread or preventing the spread of emerald ash borer is this Canadian reference here. But getting down to the specifics. Thanks a lot for the local folks such as an here from Washington County. I know she's on the call. She mentioned that Washington County does deal with wood waste already. So they can read. They can process 20 cubic yards of wood waste over 40 weeks, so 800 cubic yards of wood products produced every year and reused. And there are additional locations where the county can use more wood chips right now. We don't have a volume estimate but so they're reusing it to prevent erosion and along like streams and stuff like that. So Anne has a list of the county own wood chippers and related machinery. She has a list of storage facilities and Washington County belongs to this database with neighboring counties and they can actually share equipment. So Anne has that and she's preparing that. People on the phone call also identified. local providers are chipping, collecting and hauling materials and here are some of those entities right there. We gathered the yard debris drop off centers, the garbage Transfer Centers, there is curbside garbage pickup in Washington County does have but we don't have the list of companies yet. But here's a website that kind of points us in the right direction. And then oh, there's some other potential leads for staging areas or wood waste haulers and note there are two lumber mills close to Forest Grove Stimson is the big one. And it's right outside a hag Lake outside Gaston and then Hampton lumber mills a little bit smaller. It's just north of Forest Grove it banks. The both of these entities we did not call them but they might have additional information on contractors or how to haul or temporary storage locations. So who can use the woodchips like I said Washington County has a program and they can still have a need for chips within Washington County. And then Bob Barrows mentioned that Oda confined animal feeding operations manager when Matthews might know about dairies and dairies in the area that can use wood chips for bedding. Again, thanks to Bob Barrows that DQ, because he pulled out these resources right here. So there are DQ permitted facilities in the Forest Grove area for composting. And Bob believes that they can meet that requirement for sterilizing wood products and bark, and wood chips. So here's to just in the area. And same for DEQ. Permitted air curtain incinerator. There's a couple again in the Portland metro Forest Grove area. Chris from Metro mentioned that there's some lessons learned from Japanese beetle eradication. So for that project, Catan materials collected and hauled to a central location, and then is buried at Hillsborough landfill. And so Chris and I are meeting later today to talk about that specifics. And then there's some interesting products that might be be able to be used for all the ash that might be killed. And that is wood products, like wood pellets or firewood. So with that, that is the end of the report. To see if there's any questions here. Like Nick almonacid,
Portland.
Hi, why, thanks. That was great. Lots of really good information. I'm not sure if it's in draft form. When will that information be finalized? Or can you share it with the group? That's my first question. And my second question is, when are you touched upon quarantines? What are the thresholds that will make a quarantine occur? And I guess I'm surprised it has not already been enacted for Forest Grove. So two questions there for you. Yeah, so
yeah, I'll speak to that. First of all, thanks, Wyatt. Nick, great question. There aren't really thresholds, that inactivate a quarantine. It's really as the regulatory agency finds a condition that warrants placing or enacting quarantines and determining what those parameters are. So it's, I don't really know exactly what you meant by thresholds. But either way, just having an invasive pest is a trigger to enable it to quarantine debris, we'll talk about emergency quarantine just because of the rulemaking process is a lot faster to implement something, it also doesn't make the rule permanent. Because once a rule is permitted, it is forever there. And if you want to modify that quarantine it, there's a lot more red tape to do that. So that's why we usually start with an emergency quarantine, which is about 180 days going as to why it hasn't been put in place yet. We've been working on that just for various internal reasons. It's just taken longer. Part of that is that our acting rules advisory person has been on leave for emergency leaves. So that's kind of put a blockade and that either way I do have those paperworks ready for submission. So once those are screened and approved by our agency, then that goes through for final processing. But we don't need to have public hearing comments, rule advisory committees that are some of the other extra steps that would talk typically plays that typically take place when we're doing a permanent rulemaking process. So hopefully that answers your question. Yes, thank you.
I can chime in to Nick. When do they become final? When can we release some of these best management practices? Well, some of them, I can release to you right now, like how to best manage the material and the timing. But I really want to wait until we have another wood waste and what utilization subcommittee meeting one or two of them, because we have some loose ends, they're, like getting a list of contractors and equipment and storage facilities, I still want to tie up some loose ends. But then the big piece is getting approval from Oda, because there's some information in there about compliance agreements. And so that's going to take a regulatory agency, maybe Oda doesn't like that, or maybe they want to tweak it, or maybe it's a mutual compliance agreement process between Oda and odf, or the county. So that type of stuff is not close to being final. But the best management practices for reducing the risk of moving emerald ash borer, that's pretty well understood. So that's what we could call it his best management practices. So I can send you like a snapshot of that you want?
Yeah. So I would maybe recommend that. I totally agree with that process. Why am I get folks out there who are listening? You want this information out already, but we need to make sure that we do it right. And that we're all in consensus of what we're doing. Because if you take that care now, it avoids confusion and miscommunication happening down the line. So yeah, you're right, the wood ways utilization, you guys are the subject matter experts developing the guidelines. So then that was going to be my question is, what is the next appropriate avenue to disseminate this information? Is it handing it to the BM P group to develop a kind of document that we can then publicly share that hazard information? Or is that something that the communications group can tackle? Because I mean, at that point, we're just talking about formatting, right, just putting it in something and then getting the information out there.
I think we were happy to format it once there's consensus as we were talking about and having them because then it can get posted, it can be used as a download for people that want to print it out for their local use, etc. Like that. So it creates it in a format that seems to work for the most audiences.
Hi, Chris, welcome. Thanks. You had something to say?
That was next in the thing, and you bring up the just the point that I was gonna make, I could give a report about everything we went over. But one of the biggest questions we came up with was what is our role as the IPM BMP subcommittee? If we were, we've been approaching this, Karen, I've been meeting regularly for each two weeks, maybe I'll just jump into my report. But if people have more questions about that, feel free to stop me. Our approach, we've been meeting basically weekly, every two weeks to review resources that we're finding throughout the country of other states that have dealt with this, and sort of identifying the various various audiences within the Northwest. We've been looking at which questions we have specifically in which questions we can't answer directly. And might be different for our state, such as susceptibility or pesticides that can be used. And we found great examples. But it sounds like everyone's finding great examples. And so we've been getting our stuff and meeting with other states as well. But it sounds like everyone else has been doing that. Also, for their specific groups. The only thing I haven't heard addressed mostly is like pesticides, and which how to apply them and which ones to use, which Alex Gorman, who's on our subcommittee currently has already for the most part written up and put in the hopper to be published. So like I said, we've reached out to some of these people to collaborate with them University of Minnesota, we really liked their group, I reached out to their authors, they're more than willing to just hand over their like, we can plagiarize it directly if we wanted to. If we wanted to put it out through OSU Extension, they'll give us the InDesign files and we can just re basically rebrand it. But before we agreed to that, we had lots of questions about it, whether that's our role. And so like I said, we've been kind of approaching this with them to create a manual of if people come to us with what do I do and how do I do it? When people come to us those questions? I'll say it again. This has come up already. You just phrased it perfectly. Chris, if this is already happening is this repackaging. I'm not really sure what the IPM BMP role is. I'm a little more more confused after this. Jim addressed this earlier, we're looking at resources. They have some they like why it just said he has some resources that he likes. We've got some that we like and we're all collecting resources. So yeah, I guess that's kind of my But what I wanted to get out of the meeting today was sort of clarify our role within the larger scope and identify audiences between training comms, because there's a ton of overlap is what we're finding between the subcommittee's, especially with communications and training. Are we just coming up with content? Are we vetting anything? Do we need to vet anything? These are kind of the questions. But in terms of what we've done, we've gone through and sort of approach this with a we plan on producing some kind of document like the one that Minnesota is putting out, and we're happy to continue doing that, you know, borrowing from other resources. But do you guys just want us to bet content and handover to comms? What, what do you want us to do?
Buddy? Yeah, it's a question to be answered sort of the discussion after we hear the reports, too. I'm just posing that as our question. Yeah, Carrie.
And I think this might be something more for the steering committee to consider and sort of balance between, it seems like the communications committee can get information out quickly. But the resource should be kind of codified in a published document, maybe through OSU Extension, a bigger, this bigger guidance document that Chris and I have been considering how to publish. So we don't want to delay things. And they could be news releases or on the, on the website, but then, or be part of the official quarantine and compliance rules, but then brought into a more comprehensive kind of how to document probably published through OSU or Pacific Northwest extension.
Rob, you have a question, Robert.
Yeah, I want to echo I'm a former extension agent. And I think giving things the veneer of legitimacy coming out of OSU is very helpful for the public. And thinking in terms of the audience's that will receive that information and how they'll feel about it, which is as important in getting compliance or not, is important. So considering the source is critical, and I would advocate for as much public facing information to come out of OSU. I would recommend pairing that with the official lines about quarantine, and other regulate regulatory approaches so that you have kind of a full court press. The other piece is p and W ISA is a trusted resource for many in the arborist community, and therefore your city arborists and community foresters are going to be listening to that source as well. So there may be a way to tag team, both OSU and Isa AS resources for those two kinds of audiences. But I think the the coverage of where it comes from is as important as the content.
So what should we then be sort of aiming to get a larger document out? Eventually? Because that was our that was one of Karen's big question also is like, what are our deadlines? And Max brought this up? Also, he's on our subcommittee. Max, where I get snow is what do you guys need? And when? And it sounds like some of those discussions already happening, like Jim was brought up, like we have these things going up on the website. And there's some other you know, wood waste things, but that's been our question, too, is like, do you guys need this by December? Do you need a Christine Buell needed a pesticides list? When do you guys need that? So what it sounds like is Yeah, we should continue to keep moving on a larger document, but it's not urgent. Go ahead, Jim.
So Chris, it's apparent to me just listening to this is how much activity there is, is that the real risk isn't that any one person's not doing the work, it's that everyone starts to put out communication about it. And there's inconsistency because that's great. Minneapolis has something we love it, we pushed it out quickly to get it out there to the people that we're training we're doing. And then OSU is over here, saying Michigan did a really good job. So we've got this slightly different version. Is that 140 degrees? Or is it 175? Like in the original EAP plan? So that's who's going to check to make sure that those are all consistent. I think, ultimately, we'd like to have, I think, Roberts, Rob's point is it may be that it's OSU forestry College of Forestry or extension is, you know, got the book, the Bible, but it's also vetted by odf and Oda and US Forest Service, just like the EAP readiness plan was a joint product, right. And I think that's what we're trying to go for is to instill a little bit of a sense of the Public that everyone's kind of looked at this, and there's not really a lot of daylight between agencies on what to do.
That's it. And that's what we're trying to avoid. Also, I mean, that's why so we stopped Alex's publication, which was already put out to OSU Extension. But then that was done before there were subcommittee. So like, he started writing it, sent it out, but then his decision tree of, you know, is, is EAB. In my county, it was like, Well, wait, we don't know if that's how people are doing it. So that's already a communications problem. And, you know, what's he telling people to do? And is it which audience is he addressing? Is he addressing the homeowner? Is he addressing the wood stand owner or the lumber person or at, you know, tribal community? That was something that was like, Okay, we have a lot of different audiences. Let's he had his own audience. But that was kind of an issue too. And so, but you bring up the I mean, I have exactly the same concerns about communications, where it goes out with a different message, but you guys are already linking to stuff or like, why it's got something. So I guess that's what are we collecting resources from you guys and vetting them? Or are we finding our own? That's, I guess, what, what are they to clarify?
I mean, so I'll just interject. So like, I think what why it was working on was specific to his group, you know, he has the word utilization group. So you're right, we could have just omitted a wood utilization group and just included that as a part of the BMP group. And you could have come probably to the same outcome. But I think it was just for someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea was just to make sure that that was specifically a topic that was going to get addressed, and it was gonna get addressed at the forefront, because that's something that's going to be the primary of people like we've already been getting questions about that almost since day one, right. But I think going forward, now that we have that information, I think two things, one, that this greater booklet that you're talking about, which I think is a great idea, one, two, it could be incorporated in there, right as a section. But what I recommend waiting for that whole development of that document before releasing that information as like a standalone, like one or two pager, info guide or something, I would not recommend that because again, people want that information sooner rather than later. So I guess maybe that makes it more complicated. But I don't think we can wait for all of this to be produced all at the same time.
No, I don't think so. I think it clarifies it. And I think maybe Karen, correct me if I'm wrong, it just makes it. So we've been, I think maybe approaching it in the reverse. So like, we should have been hearing what everybody else is going and collecting these information. So the different groups are doing it with the idea of doing it, rather than we jumped ahead, and we're like, okay, what are their estates doing? Because if we were the how, then we're like, well, we don't really, because I mean, we this came up in our discussions, too. It's like, no one's gonna ask, come to me and ask how to do floodways even though like, you know, we did the same research. I don't want that responsibility. So
you said that you were working on the pesticide and usage part, which is exactly the kind of thing that I think we were thinking that your group would be tackling,
because we brought, because I saw he'd already done it. So it was like, Wait, let's, let's slow it down. So okay, good. There's Wyatt.
Yeah. Thanks for letting me chime in. Yeah. So when we were kind of dreaming up these subcommittees that IPM was just that what are the nuts and bolts for pesticides? In particular, any sort of like slam slow ash mortality, just what are the what's the latest research results, and if there was something with the mechanical, you know, chipping and stuff like that, that you could feed into the wood waste. One thing I didn't mention about the wood waste is the whole notion of this Forest Practices Act, and people wanting to get out ahead of ash or EAB, and harvest ash and replant it. So that's kind of in that realm of Woodway. So I didn't mention that today. But I think the IPM in my opinion is to is to get the latest and most up to date, things on the pesticides, biological control, chemical control, cultural control, all those things that go into IPM. Now, it's just my two cents.
Yeah, and so And along those lines, I get that part of it too. But then like for the bio control, we can have a best manager practice for that. But there's already guidelines in place and specific rules. So it's not like we can recommend bio control. Because it's like, it has to be 40 acres, it has to be established. So like, how do I it's different than like a another IPM approach. Like, that's kind of like going into it, we've looked at it, like, what did you do for normal IPM if you're a farm or something like that, and whereas this has, like, kind of different, it's very specific, and there's not a lot of options, since it's
there's gonna be done by USDA and by the state agency. So you're right, Chris, at that, that might not have been
the fusion, we're running into this and was like, every single topic, so but I think it could have a clearer idea. And again, Karen, if you have any comments jump in, but that's kind of been just a report back what we've been doing. That's been one of the biggest questions and one of the biggest challenges is what are we actually doing with the information that we're collecting. So but this has been helpful.
Okay, And I think maybe that's a learning opportunity for other folks and subcommittees that when you're when your committee kind of hits a point like that, maybe that's the time to speak out, reach out, bring that to attention to your leads, so that they can bring it to the steering committee. And then they can talk to each other and kind of help create some direction. Or if you have feel like your group may be overlapping with another group and reach out to the lead of that other subcommittee and say, Hey, this is something we're dealing on. And we overlapping here, is there a way that we can collaborate? Because I'm sure this isn't the first time this is going to happen. And this will probably, you know, it's just just how it goes when you've got something that this is complicated. And we're still in figuring this out altogether. So I appreciate everyone's patience, but also, there's just a lot of good ideas out there. So I think that that's also part of it. So are two, basically 230. I think we're actually maybe doing a better time than I thought we were. So let's move on to we got two more groups. We have our training training group, and I think the who's on our Alex Gorman, Alex, or do you have anything for the training group that you'd like to update us on?
Oh, yeah, we sure do. So, first one to start off. I know there were a few people who might have been able to, or trying to join our subcommittee meeting earlier today, we were using zoom, instead of teams and teams does the silly thing where it creates a team's meeting for meetings that aren't in teams. So if he was one of you, I will reach out, we will just stick with teams. Also, I wasn't planning on bringing this up. But after hearing everyone and especially Christian Wyatt talk about it. So our subcommittee is having the same issue that the IPM BNP is kind of sitting here thinking, okay, are we obsolete as a subcommittee, because if Oda if everyone's trying to develop trainings, and you know, someone's giving a training to California and Washington and someone's giving a training to this group in this group, and we, you know, are is so obtained with Chris, like, what is our role? Are we vetting, training information? Are we creating training information? There are currently only four of us. So are we creating the information and also implementing that to Northern California, Oregon and southern Washington? That's, that's kind of very big a amorphous questions that we keep running into is, we've we've had some great, a great couple meetings about who we think, where we think our target priority areas for training should be. So like Washington County, and the adjacent counties, and then who we think our priority level of target audiences, you know, starting from those of those people who are in the trees, arborist Master Gardeners all the way down to general public being kind of the least priority. But it really I think, comes back to what clearly defined is, what it what our role is, much like, what what Chris Hedstrom just said, and then also, along those same lines, is we would like to know, either from the steering committee or kind of whoever wants to chime in on this and Dan Stark, and Scott, unhealth blue, who are also on the subcommittee, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it'd be nice to know, where we want trainings to go, because we can spend two FTE developing training for, you know, the information we get from let's say, wouldn't utilization. But if the general public or the training audiences really want trainings on bio control, you know, we want to make sure we're going down the right rabbit hole at the right time. And like I said, we've we've kind of napkin out what we think appropriate trainings are at appropriate time. But again, if you know, Oda, and you know, different subcommittees are creating different trainings to different people that's just want to make sure we're keeping the message consistent, because I feel like our subcommittee especially is outward facing. And so that's another thing I wanted to bring up, especially to the Communications Committee, it'd be great to get some sort of either on wherever this, this end all be all EAB website is going to be it would be wonderful on that webpage to get a link or a button or something to say, you know, so if I go on there, and I'm interested in training, I can click on that I can fill out my information. And then along those same lines, I saw that each subcommittee was assigned an email, I think through Oregon invasive species Council. It would, it would be great, especially for our trading subcommittee to be able to have access to that email as a one stop so that the four of us aren't trying to balance emails from all of you and from the public and from everyone else. So I see and has a question. So I'm going to stop talking and, and go for it.
Hello, everyone, I just wanted to add that I really appreciate all the work everyone's doing. And I think it's incredibly inspiring to see us all come together on this. And in regards to the wood waste, and utilization, I'm still trying to track down equipment, it's a little bit harder to find extra equipment that's not being utilized, or that maybe extra lot of it's already spoken for. So just trying to work out those details, we'll get those two soon, as well as temporary storage locations, working with our land use regulations to figure out where that would be okay. And then in regards to the training, I know that there's some other trainings that have taken place, which is great, I understand there's, you know, really good turnout, for our maintenance vegetation crews. The time commitment for those training was just not going to work out with the operations we have going on. So I actually ended up developing a training based on the same resources that we're all discussing. So I don't know if that's helpful to the training committee, I'm happy to send out the the training i put together, just so we can combine resources.
Yeah. You think, Dan, it's fantastic. And kind of similar thing with what Jim was saying is, you know, if our role is just to bet, the training that you all come up with, for your individual audiences, we know, I suppose we can, we can do that. Because we don't want to reinvent the wheel 150 times. But we also want to make sure that, at the very least, we're made aware of what trainings are happening. So we don't. So I in my role as an extension force are not reaching out and trying to, like, you know, train people who've already been trained, then it would also it's very important that we keep track of the numbers of who we are training. So we can take those numbers to the states, and we can take, I can take those numbers to my boss and and say, like, you know, this, this has been worth it 75% FTE, because we've trained 2000 people. So Dan, you have a question. Something to say Dan is off on his testimony with OSU Extension?
Yeah, hi, everybody. And I, this is my first meeting to attend. And, yeah, we just met the subcommittee early this morning. So it's nice to meet you all. I'm an Oregon State Extension agent on the north coast and classic Tila, MC and Lincoln Counties. And I've also run the Oregon forest pest detector program that was handed to me after a undergrad is unfortunate passing. And Alex is a big partner in that, as of all of you. That's one thing that did come up, you know, for us, I just wanted to share what Alex just said to it would be nice. If our subcommittees could be treated as the hub for everything that we're doing communications, we direct it to there, we each have our own, but we have to engage these subcommittees that seems from being new to this group. And for that very point that Alex just mentioned is, you know, we need to keep our hands on who were who's been reached out to, for example, at our previous meeting this morning, it came up that we have this, you know, Isa group that would be wonderful to reach out to because they get all this information. So I'm hearing that someone else is already kind of doing that. So we I think it would do this, I think would be worthwhile to make sure that we are clear with our roles and responsibilities of each of these subcommittees and what are what it is that we're supposed to do and how the rest of this group is supposed to how they're supposed to interact with those groups. Otherwise, we're just going to be doing everything that we're trying to avoid communicating here doing this and doing that, and it's going to be impossible. That's where my brain goes. So anything extension could help and carry that along. And to help facilitate that process would be what you would be happy to help out with that.
Okay, two more comments. Robert, you were first and then we'll go to Jim.
Just real quick. I feel like steering we need to meet soon and probably talk about scope with each of the committee leads and identify like, what's the highest priority scope items? I mean, Jim and Cody and why others have identified those but we have at least two teams where scope is in question. And, and it feels like this is centerfield for steering to really dive into the response plan, which has some of that outlined, look at some other state responses and play centerfield on these things. That's yeah,
so that is the point of the steering committee is to help when these sorts of issues come up. But we need to hear from the subcommittee's first before we can come to the conclusion that okay, we need to gather and have that discussion. So you're right on point, Robert, for sure. Addressing the concern of the subcommittee for training, I will admit that my, when we created these subcommittees, I thought the intention was that that was the purpose of the subcommittee training subcommittee was that to create training opportunities for various audiences, however it does seem that is the problem is that there are multiple groups that are all doing their individual trainings. So I get, I hear you on that. And that is going to be a problem. And we do need to kind of figure out a way of how to keep people in their shop, so to speak, and also a better way to kind of encourage cross pollination between the groups and communication. But I will touch on one thing about again, I've said this before about the bio control in particular, that really is a specific function that's happening at FDA, with the support of USDA, that's really not going to pop into any other group really, because that has very specific parameters, we have specific funding for that. So there is training that's happening. And the reason it's coming from Oda are coming from USDA is because of the framework in which that's being created. So that's not something that we're going to pass on to OSU, for example, to do that training. And that's not something that another group is going to do. So I just wanted to be clear that that is kind of like the one little I think exam.
Because I want to, I want to reinforce that too. I think what you're getting at is that there's two audiences here, there's the primary audience around ground zero, Forest Grove, and those industry leaders that are actually taking our preliminary data right now. And I think that's where the disposal committee and the survey committee are really kind of going after right now. And I think what we might need to talk about is these other subcommittees working with, is there another audience that's maybe a larger audience, in my mind, I'm thinking of like master gardeners, first detectors, people who are on the ground, who might not have as much of a stake in ground zero, but have a larger, more peripheral purview. And I think that's where I'm kind of seeing someone like Alex Gorman's group kind of working on some of these other larger, more public groups. But that's arbitrary. And again, I that's where it's, it's always gonna be tough to parse these groups out. But that's, I'm, I want to reinforce what you're saying there. Because I do think there are two different audiences that we're kind of already getting after. Yeah, yeah. And
I and for some other security things. And I also want to throw out So Dan, and I, especially in our work as extension deal heavily with both of those groups. And I will tell you from and Dan, feel free to correct me or back me up from both of those groups, no one cares about, I can't spray in the until the spring or that adults don't fly until the spring. They want to know what they can use with their apps right now they want to do, they just you know, so it's, we have, especially with extension have that fine line between saying please hold on, while we while the people who are experts get this stuff together, and then giving people actual valid information that they can use, even if it's just a little something to make them feel like they've been seen and heard. So when those things were, the training subcommittee won't be delivering your crane trainings, because it's really outside of our purview. It would be wonderful to get a fact sheet or something that we can say, hey, we're not gonna have a training on this. But this is just a little as much or as little as you want to put on it. To be like, yep, because I can also tell you that one of the most common questions I get is bio control. Like, you know, are these blasts going to come kill my kids? You know, and I'd be like, no, they're super tiny, you won't do anything. So just something to think about as we're moving forward is keep that public viewpoint in mind and practitioner viewpoint as well. Not to mention the miscommunication that's going on. But that's a story. Jim,
your cat is getting increasingly impatient.
She is. Yeah, I agreed with Dan and Alex's earlier comments. I think one thing to keep in mind is that over time, this is a marathon. So every county eventually will be at ground zero of its own right. So right now, it's very easy because there's Forest Grove and there's kind of a discrete group of people we're dealing with, like Rob's group Been tall and whatever. But what happens when it moves to Yamhill. And now you get a whole other set of characters. So, to the degree that we're thinking about trainings and others, it may be easy to do that centralized at the beginning. Forestry force OSU, forestry, fortunately, is all over the state. So they're in a good position to offer trainings, and learn from one county extension agent to the other, you know, so we might want to think about this in terms of that longer term, will there need to be a case of maybe the training committees, empowering trainings, here's sort of what's been vetted. Here's the sheet if you need it, here's a training module if you need it, we're going to provide it through us your extension where we can have the capacity, but others who might want to do that, say in an urban forestry environment, we're OSU forestry extension, maybe not quite as plugged in, or a soil water conservation group gets together and doesn't I think a lot of people are probably gonna end up doing trainings over the long haul. And what we want, I think, in the steering group is a sense of, are those trainings consistent with each other? That's more I think we're Rhian communications are like, can we kind of stand behind whether it's a human Tila County, extension agent? Or is it somebody from the city of Eugene communicating, you know, to arborists in the city of Eugene, that that would be I think we're the goal. The common goal is yeah, you can take what Alex in that training committee developed in 2022. And we'll update it periodically as needed. But that's pretty much solid stuff. And if you want to do your own training, God bless. Sure. You've got capacity, and you're using your local funds to reach the seven people on that neighborhood association, then go there, right?
Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome, Jim.
Great. Okay, Dan, you still have your hand up? Do you have another comment? Good. All right. Hands down.
I will say one, one quick update. Last one. Oh, no, I do want to be the guy that was like, overtime. To go off of what Jim was saying. We've already been talking about kind of that forward thinking, developing trend of trainer programs for our OSU Extension agents. And then also, how can we package a train the trainer program of, you know, kits and trainings that are boilerplate that can be updated and be like, here you go, sort of Eugene, have fun. Let us know if you have questions. So we that is yes, I'd love to hear that. And we're already it's already kind of been popping around our brain. So love to hear that someone else's thing. That's
great. Okay, so today, we're gonna move on from that topic. But thank you, everyone for that. So last, but I guess, maybe least, maybe not least, I'm on the agenda for update for funding. So really just want to give folks update for what Oda is done for the funding efforts. So so far, I have a little couple slides really quick. I like slides, sorry, and helps me stay on point for what I'm talking about. Is that up? So we have, we've put forward the eboard request. So just for folks who aren't kind of familiar with what eboard is, it just stands for emergency board. So basically, when you know, every biennium, the state, all agencies odf, Oda DEQ, all of them have the opportunity to put forward their budget asks to the governor's office for creating new positions or additional funding for programs creating new programs and the like. But what we're trying to ask for funding outside of that window, then we have to appeal to what's called the emergency board. And so because EAB came online, really after the agency was well progressed with our budget development. And what we call our budget asks a physician asked, we had to go to the board and kind of propose a budget for that monetary ask. So hopefully, this is big enough. Like you can get rid of this sideboard there. So together asking for a total of 450,000 I'm Excuse me 550,000. So in this slide, I just kind of outlined, breaking it down to what we were looking at. And I do want to stress that with this September eboard meeting that's coming up next week. These are funds that would become available this fall but are only really just covering the end of this biennium, so the biennium let ends at the end of June of 2023. So it's roughly about seven or eight months worth of time for this for usage of these funds. So a lot of this is focusing on for like OTAs need, but in part also trying to supplement needs that we already know that we're going to anticipating I should say that we're going to come online. So again over the winter, we've talked about this I think today already the surveys will continue through the winter. So we're looking for funding today. by additional four technicians that will help our existing staff for surveys, we do have an outreach coordinator. But I'd like to be able to dedicate at least about a third of their time to again help with OTAs outreach efforts. And likewise a dedicated response coordinator. So we don't have a full fledged standalone EAP program ODA, everyone's wearing multiple hats and is participating in multiple projects and surveys across the state. But if we could have one person who was kind of keeping an eye on the EAB efforts, that would really help us in our capacity. Unfortunately, it's not going to be a permanent position, this is a limited duration position, meaning that it's temporary. So once these funds are used up, or end by June of 2023, we then have to go back to the eboard again, and appeal for additional funding to continue that position. That's not ideal. But this is the framework that we have to work in. Going off of that just money for supporting staff. And this is kind of what kind of appeals to the greater community. So in part is for tree felling. Again, as part of those surveys that happened in the winter, some of those trees, we will need to fell. So talking with our bio control specialists in that group, you know, we can see what's happening in a tree and looking for galleries and exit holes on the trunk that's you know, as tall as we are that we can see. But you know, a lot of times, what we really need to see in the canopy is well beyond our reach. So we need to fill those trees to be able to look and see if we can see symptoms on the upper part of the canopy. In addition to peeling bark of trees to see galleries, which is easy to do once a trees are felled. green waste collection, we've talked a lot about green waste removal. But that doesn't come for free. That's another lesson we've learned from JB the we, and by we meaning the ODA, we pay a significant cost for those collection areas. And we have two big contracts for those who we need funds for that. And treatments, people are already asking a lot about treatments. 60,000 isn't a lot. But again, that's just an initial, we could not have any idea of what to anticipate how many trees, we would be treating. And this isn't going to be a silver bullet where we can inject every tree that we come across. So again, this would be for targeted trees, people who may have heritage trees, or ones that we feel are in particular cases that are warrant trying to save. So again, if we get this, if the if we were awarded these funds, they would need to be used by the end of June 2023. So just really quickly, what does that timeline look like? So we submitted this request formally already, back in August. The next session for coming to hearing is next week and what we call legislative days. So really, that just is the opportunity for us to be on the agenda for the committee, most likely it will be the Natural Resources Committee. We just present their ass to the committee gives them an opportunity to ask us questions. Typically, those questions revolve around like reiterating, what is the exact need for the funds? How would they be used? How do they benefit, not just Oda with a greater, greater affected community. And then if approved, that goes on to the full, fuller greater Ways and Means Committee, which is put in task of reviewing all of these assets that come from various organizations. And these move pretty quickly. So it could be as early as probably anticipate, by the end of next week, we will know for sure if we get these funds, the directors opposite OTAs rather competent that we will but nothing's ever done, said and done until you get the formal approval. So barring all that, that goes as we anticipate we can expect to see that funding roll in probably mid October could be it could be November. So that's my update that I have on that. And then we'll open to questions if anybody has any. Karen Ripley is also on our funding committee. I don't know if she had anything that you'd like to share with the group.
Yeah, my camera was slow in getting started. But the Forest Service has already committed $75,000 In Year End funds to the Oregon Department of Forestry to support a coordinator in its urban and community forestry program to because a lot of emerald ash borer is urban issues. odf is also supporting 25% of that position, and we'll support 75 75% We have $75,000 that we could use to support Oda and the Oregon invasive species council for their animal dashboard needs. We need to obligate that probably next month. And so maybe as this eboard request comes through, if there are other gaps or other things that could supplement it Um, we just need to get established the details. If there's not a need for it, we could probably send it towards the Washington State, urban and community forestry program, because that's sort of the next domino that's going to fall. But our priority is, is to support Oda in the Oregon invasive species Council. We've just received another $70,000 from the bipartisan infrastructure law. And that's available for emerald ash borer response. And we haven't given a lot of thought to how or who that funding will be directed to. And it comes these infrastructure laws come with a lot of extra administrative requirements for regular reporting. And it's just a sort of extra and administrative deal. So we want to be deliberate and whoever we give it to, needs to be mentally prepared, and administratively prepared that there's big workload with this stuff, but it is, you know, 70 1000s, nothing to sneeze at, that can buy that can buy a lot of good stuff. So that's where we are 70,000 to be determined. 75 already to ODF 75, for intended for Oda and oisc.
Thank you, Karen and Chris. I think we're running red on our three o'clock adjournment here. Were there any questions for Chris or Karen?
Adams? Got a question.
Oh, yes. Thank you.
Yeah, not so much a question. But related to that bipartisan infrastructure law funds. So as I understand, Karen, we're through a cooperative forest health grant, we're getting $333,000 a year for forest health, an additional three and a 33,000 for urban and community forestry. And so our plan, we're working on a budget for that now to cover I believe three natural resource specialist positions focused on emerald ash borer, and a forest management tech. And then a lot of those funds will be used for contractual funds, too. So Scott, ottenhoff and myself are currently working on the budget for that. But those are some additional funds that we can use towards the end.
Thank you. And outscoring?
Yeah, my camera also taking a second to startup but any for the funding? hasn't been any look at funding opportunities for training and technical assistance. That would go any any would go a lot, lot a lot really far, especially for purchasing materials. And potentially a coordinator don't need an answer right now. Just wanted to kind of throw that out.
There you have any quick reactions to that?
This is Jake from USDA does look like somebody submitted a proposal on VBA 7721. I don't remember if that was Alex.
Christian and I Yeah.
So I know we've already provided feedback on that on the internal review, and it's going through that review process. So that's one avenue. I'll put forward for additional resources for a training and going through that.
In just a couple few next steps. We are scheduled for another one of these meetings October 11 at 1pm. So we'll encourage all the committees to keep meeting and report back on your updates next month. Next week during the legislative hearings, the invasive species Council will be doing a kind of a reintroduction panel to the House Agriculture Committee Wednesday, sometime between 230 and 5pm. A very brief porch portion of that will be a quick update about EAB to the committee. It's going to be mostly a summary of what we've covered in here. So we're working with some folks to to do Get on that panel and join folks from the corporate counsel. So just in case you are paying attention to the legislative hearings that will be popping up on that committee. Any other items for the good of the order before we adjourn? Okay, I'm not seeing any hands. So thank you everybody for your time today and all of your work especially those leading the committee's please let me know if I there's anything I can do to support you guys. And please keep sending me your emails to get on all the various teams and channels and all that fun stuff. We'll try to keep that organized. And then Jim, I'll get Chris back. I'll get with you on trying to get our website together, as well. Okay, thank you very much, everybody. Have a good afternoon.
Thanks, all thank you for your time. Thank you. Bye. Thanks, everybody.
