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by Judy Kelley-Moberg
With a lot of hard work, a little help from our friends, and NAWCA Grant funds, FrOGS has been able to acquire an 18-acre patch of uplands and floodplain meadow bordering Quaker Brook at the corner of Haviland Hollow Road and East Branch Road in the Town of Patterson.
Quaker Brook, sometimes called Haviland Hollow Brook, runs through the 18-acre parcel before turning south to join the East Branch of the Croton River in the Great Swamp. The brook begins in Connecticut, flows through Deep Hollow then into New York where it runs parallel to Haviland Hollow Road. Several tributaries join the brook near the Connecticut border. The streams drain portions of New York State's Cranberry Mountain Preserve. One stream flows through a deep limestone gorge in Putnam Counties' Ciaiola Park and another drops down the mountainside in a series of small waterfalls along an abandoned section of Stagecoach Road. As Quaker Brook wanders westward through the forested valley it's criss-crossed with beaver dams and passes through the ruins of a massive milldam to emerge in the wide wet meadow of the 18-acre parcel. It then runs under East Branch Road and into a wooded floodplain before it joins the Croton River.
Quaker Brook is not only a major artery that feeds the "heart" of the Great Swamp but it's also an ecologically unique and important waterway. Fishermen know this brook as a pristine trout stream thought to be one of the rare places where native trout populations can still survive. It has one of the highest trout streams ratings given by the State of New York. FrOGS hopes to see the entire stream corridor protected from the Connecticut border to the Great Swamp. The corridor would connect the County and State parks near the Connecticut border to the future Great Swamp Conservation Area. The acquisition of this 18-acre piece of wet meadow is an important step towards reaching this goal. The property already connects parcels donated by Putnam County, another partner in the "Heart of the Great Swamp" NAWCA Grant, to the Elena Hill Preserve along Route 22 owned by the Putnam Land Trust. This 18-acre corner parcel will provide access to the whole Quaker Brook corridor.
Camp Herrlich honored Jim Utter with their Community Leadership Award at their 2007 "Autumn in Putnam" fund raising dinner dance. The following article was printed in the fall edition of The Herald, Camp Herrlich's newsletter:
"More than 180 guests gathered in the ballroom at the Putnam National Golf Club in Mahopac to honor special guest, Dr. Jim Utter, as the recipient of the 2007 Community Leadership Award. As a BOCES certified environmental education center, Camp Herrlich chose to recognize Dr. Utter for his important research and teaching of Environmental Sciences particularly in the area of the wetland dependent migratory birds within the Great Swamp Wetland."The article also praised Jim for promoting awareness of the values and needs for conservation of the Great Swamp for over 20 years and his active participation in land protection and habitat preservation.
FrOGS Chairman, Dr. Jim Utter, was recognized by Dutchess County Executive William Steinhaus at the "1st Annual County Executive Green Achievement Awards" on October 25th at a ceremony at the Bowdoin Park Community Center in the Town of Poughkeepsie. Awards were presented in five different categories: Government, Education, Non-Profit, Commercial and Individual. Dr. Utter was recognized in the "Individual Category" for his environmental work and preservation efforts in the 6,000 acre Great Swamp, and his success in protecting hundreds of acres in the Great Swamp through partnership with various organizations funded by a NAWCA grant as well as private donations.
County Executive Steinhaus stated, "Our Green Achievement Awards are our way of recognizing those who have gone the extra mile to preserve and protect our environment. The Green Achievement Awards were designed to credit the good work of individuals and corporations who are making strides to help sustain and protect the environment".
FrOGS remembers one of the founding members of the Friends of the Grweat Swamp.
The current "bottle bill" has increased recycling of soda and beer containers and reduced the amount of litter in places like the Great Swamp, but the majority of bottles we purchase are exempt from the deposits that encourage their return. The new Bottle Bill would extend coverage to these other bottles, and in addition, it would mandate the public's recovery of the unclaimed deposits, rather than leaving it as a "windfall profit" for the beverage companies. This critical change will likely add $100 million or more to the Environmental Protection Fund which supports land acquisitions in the Great Swamp and elsewhere.
As part of FrOGS' Saving New York's Great Swamp Federal NAWCA project, EPF supplied the money for protection of 300 acres of Great Swamp wetland and upland buffer on Cornwall Hill Road in Patterson. This land is now open to the public. Other benefits of the Bigger Better Bottle Bill include reducing the expensive waste stream headed to landfills and increasing public awareness of how each of us can help improve environmental health.
Dr. Jim Utter, Purchase College Environmental Studies Program
and Chairman, Friends of the Great Swamp
The Nature Conservancy surprised Patterson Supervisor Michael Griffin with a gift of $ 10,000 to the Town to be used for creating trails and educational displays on the Town's recently acquired 63-acre tract in the Great Swamp adjacent to the Patterson Environmental Park. Mark King, land protection director for the Nature Conservancy, handed Supervisor Griffin the check at the FrOGS Annual Meeting on November 19, 2005. The funds were donated to the Town to help make the new parcel more user-friendly. Some of the possible uses are to create a boardwalk and also a handicap-accessible trail.
"This will allow people to see it," stated Dr. James Utter, Chairman of FrOGS. "Portions of this new section added to the Patterson Environmental Park contain some uplands and some transition areas that are valuable to wildlife and well suited to trails. Some of the wetland area acquired borders the East Branch Croton River as well. It is not just a matter of acquiring land. It is a matter of bringing people on to it. The funds will allow the Town to make more use of the land acquired. The new parcel is only a block away from the Matthew Patterson Elementary school and can be used as an outdoor laboratory for science classes as well.
The Town of Patterson has created a website dedicated to the topic of stormwater runoff and low impact development (LID). The site teaches the causes and effects of stormwater runoff, and offers tips to homeowners on how to avoid common problems through such means as maintaining their septic systems, making careful choices in landscaping and grading, and reduced reliance on chemicals and pesticides. The site is well illustrated and contains some interactive features. It can be reached via the town website, and selecting "Stormwater Management" from the menu on the left.
LID is a recently developed, comprehensive, alternative technology for stormwater management and environmental protection. LID combines many old and new management principles and practices. Its effective use, requires a shift in mind-set, a rethinking of stormwater management, and a change in view from seeing stormwater as a nuisance to considering it a valuable resource. LID uses a wide array of innovative methods to retain, detain, filter, recharge and use runoff through decentralized distributed integrated small-scale controls. It is based on sound engineering, environmental principles and years of practical experience throughout the US and Europe in watershed protection and ecological restoration.
LID is complementary to other innovative site planning principles. It enriches the range of tools available to site planners, engineers and regulators. LID goals are accomplished by reestablishing the predevelopment volume of runoff, recharge, storage and evaporation. An integrated "treatment train" of micro-management features restore the frequency, duration, quality and quantity of runoff discharge. The goal of LID is to restore important ecological functions in a watershed such as the hydrologic regime.
Unlike conventional stormwater management where runoff is, concentrated, collected and conveyed to a centralized treatment facility as quickly as possible, LID is just the opposite. Runoff is dispersed, held controlled on the site to be recharged, filtered, evaporated and used. LID principles such as a hydrologically functional landscape, uniform distribution of small controls and strategic timing can be universally applied to all urban, suburban and rural developments as well as urban and suburban retrofit.
With LID techniques every urban landscape feature (roofs, streets, parking, open space, sidewalks and green space) can be designed to be multifunctional incorporating detention, retention, filtration or runoff use. An additional benefit is LID is a significant cost reduction. Construction and maintenance costs can be reduced by 20% to 30% compared to conventional approaches. Pollutant removal approaches 95%. Property values and sales velocity are significantly enhanced.
The basic steps to an LID design include:
Many municipalities and governmental agencies are beginning to question the efficacy of conventional stormwater management technology. They are finding it harder to fund stormwater programs due to the increasing maintenance burdens of the growing and aging stormwater infrastructure created by conventional approaches.
In an attempt to improve the effectiveness of it's stormwater technology, Prince George's County, Maryland, Department of Environmental Resources (PGDER) began exploring alternative stormwater management practices and strategies back in 1990. The development of bioretention and a plant soil filter technique or "Rain Gardens" (using the green space to manage runoff within small depressed upland landscaped areas) lead to the understanding of how to engineer and integrate small-scale lot level techniques into the developed landscape to maintain and/or restore hydrologic functions. In 1999 PGDER in cooperation with US EPA released the national version of the Low Impact Design (LID) manual on the use and analysis of decentralized distributed source controls.
The goal of LID is to use innovative lot level based management strategies and techniques that allow a site to be developed in a manner that maintains the predevelopment hydrologic regime and preserves essential ecosystem functions.