Dear Friends of the Reservation,

See below for date and time of the city and DCR meeting related to the storm water basin and wetlands restoration project which will get underway this fall. See notes of last site visit meeting attached.

Community Meeting Wednesday, September 7, 6:30 to 8:00 PM West Cambridge Youth Center, 680 Huron Avenue

This is the time to create a monitoring team. Individual questions will prove interesting but will not help with the careful monitoring we will need to watch over the next several years.

I hope that some of you will attend this meeting and take on a role for monitoring regularly as you travel through the area, and for meeting on a regular basis with Bruno Cardarelli of Kleinfelder/SEA for the City and with Catherine Woodbury and Dan Driscoll of DCR, and representatives, and Duke Bitsko of Bioengineering.

Again, without a team approach we will not be able to protect our only wildlife refuge in Cambridge and towns. If we can call ourselves the Alewife Reservation community storm water monitoring team, we can make good faith efforts and remain connected to the project. Some can take photos, some will look carefully at the specs that have to do with excavation process, timing, and natural resources protection, some can make reports on their observations, and others might do some GPS measuring for us. The City has posted most of the project on their website. see below.

Those attending the meeting will be community in Cambridge, Arlington, Belmont and engineers, designers, state planners and others. The issues we should address, which are committed from the site visit as community observers might be the following, unless you can suggest an issue that must be posed to the appropriate source:

1. Unblocking on wildlife corridor from Blair Pond to the Reservation
2. Regular bi-weekly written updates on the Bulletin Board on both ends of the Reservation
3. A community meeting with engineers 3 times a year with representatives from FAR and other groups
4. Plantings of storm water wetlands
5. Blair Pond DCR dredging and protecting wildlife and minimizing intrusion into Blair urban wild

(Keep in mind there is no room for changing what has been permitted on many levels. There were 20 community meetings several years ago over a 2 year period whereby the city went back to the drawing boards and at the end, a very large meeting was held at the Mystic River Watershed Association office in Arlington with over 50 attending to a panel of engineers and project proponents, and a clear consensus was reached that the environmental communities in the region supported the project. Attached again is the project:

STORM WATER WETLANDS PLANS FOR CITY OF CAMBRIDGE
FULL EXCAVATION COMING SOON
Storm Water Basin Brochure
FAR COMMUNITY COMMITTEE PUBLICATION FROM FISH AND WILDLIFE GRANT

http://www.mhd.state.ma.us/ProjectInfo/Main.asp?ACTION=ViewProject&PROJECT_NO=600811
CHECK OUT THE PLANS.

http://www.cambridgema.gov/theworks/cityprojects/detail.aspx?path=%2fsitecore%2fcontent%2fhome%2ftheworks%2fcityprojects%2f2011%2fcambridgeparkdrivewetlands
SCHEDULE