Technical Committee

Minutes

Ithaca Area Waste Water Treatment Facility

Third Street

Ithaca, New York

November 3, 2000

10 am to 12 noon

Present: Kate Hackett (Tompkins County Planning and WRC), Sharon Anderson (Tompkins County Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) and WRC), Karin Harje (Tomkins County CCE), Cliff Callinan (NYSDEC), Pete Loucks (Cornell University), Linda Wagenet (Cornell Center for the Environment), Eve Minson (Cornell University), Jose Lozano (City of Ithaca), David Zorn (G/FLRPC)

1. Additions to the Agenda - Grant Proposals (Jose Lozano)

2. Draft Monitoring Plan - Cliff Callinan made a presentation on the current state of the draft monitoring plan framework. He will email a copy of the framework to Dave Zorn who will email it out for review, input and comment (UPDATE: copy of framework emailed out on November 8, 2000 to Technical Committee)

3. Relative Risk Assessment/Statistical Analysis of Characterization - Linda Wagenet discussed Relative risk assessment to determine priorities for watershed management and restoration in the Cayuga Lake Watershed. The focus would be developing a weighted priority list to implement the management plan based on some framework rather than “best guess.” The idea would be to look at the frequency of key words in the Characterization, weight them by technical factors and then analyze the relative importance of concepts or characteristics. We could use the Department of State database of key words (?) This idea was evaluated with a statistics professor at Cornell (Marty Wells). Dr. Wells noted that an advisor in environmental science or a related field would be essential to the process because a statistician or statistics grad student could not do the weighting or understand relative importance. H used the analogy of weighting the importance of volatilization of solvents from golf balls to the importance of farm runoff. Someone has to make the decision about relative importance...The process would be based on land use characteristics. Values for the analysis would be put together then the question would be focused. Dr. Wells estimates that once this was done, the overall analysis would take about 20 hours. Consulting firms charge around $250/hour whereas and individual would charge around $150/hour. Thus, we are estimating the analysis to cost between $3000 and $5000. The Technical Committee will explore funding possibilities for this statistical analysis.

4. Review of Process and Products to this Point - Dave Zorn distributed and discussed outline on handout entitled Cayuga Lake Watershed Management Plan Project, Technical Goals, Objectives, Tasks, November 2000 (sent out via email to Technical Committee November 2, 2000)

5. Discussion of 3rd Year Process and Products - Dave Zorn distributed and discussed outline on handout entitled Additional Data Collection & Analysis and Development of Management Strategies (sent out via email to Technical Committee November 2, 2000). Additional items included public participation forums tentatively scheduled for winter and spring of 2001.

6. Grant Proposal - Web-linked Interactive CD-ROM (Jose Lozano) - Draft proposal enclosed for review and comment.