JAY – The Board of Selectmen is considering developing a forest management plan for the town’s three woodlots. Steve Gettle, timberland services manager for Timber Resource Inc., brought the idea to the board at Monday night’s meeting.
“The town has a lot of valuable timber,” he said.
Gettle said the benefit of having a forestry plan is that “when you enter each stand to harvest, it is on a schedule. It’s like when you come back every six months for a dental checkup. You can take out the poor quality, diseased trees every 15 years, and then the trees you (left to grow), you can go back and thin those out in another 15 years.”
A lot of about 70 acres is near the town’s transfer station, two parcels totaling 185 acres are at the gravel pit on East Jay Road and the third, at a little less than 200 acres, is behind the Jay High School.
Gettle said there is more gravel to be found at the pit if the town were willing to build a road to it. “They could clear the trees where they will mine the gravel instead of just knocking them over when they mine,” he said.
Most of the wood at the gravel pit is poplar, the value of which is going down at the moment, Gettle said. “But it’ll go back up,” he added.
The lot behind the school is of the most interest to Gettle.
“That’ll be the showcase woodlot for the town,” he told the board.
“There’s been less activity on it as far as forestry goes,” he added later. “The other lots have been picked and poked at.”
Gettle also sees the lot as a great learning tool for the students. Gettle is active with Project Learning Tree, an organization that shows teachers how to use the outdoors to teach their students. He works with Rob Taylor, the high school’s gifted and talented director and Envirothon coach, to teach students about tree identification and “forest issues in general,” he said.
“Most schools would have to travel for something like this,” he said. “These kids just have to go outside.”
Gettle said the students could help cruise the lot, or inventory the stands of trees. Cruising a lot is tallying the number of trees, the species and the trees themselves within systematic points over the woodlot. The entire value of the woodlot is estimated on the figures from those stands. Taylor and another teacher from the Jay High School are attending a PLT course this weekend to learn about forest inventory growth.
Along with gifted and talented students and the Envirothon team, Gettle sees opportunity for math and science classes to learn from the woodlot, and alternative education students could also benefit.
“I think you have the teachers that would use that resource,” he told the board.
Trails could also be developed through the forest management plan. “Your skid trails should be the trails that you want in the end,” Gettle said. “The bottom line is that you want nice, healthy forest with trails.”
Gettle will appear before the board of selectmen again on July 17 at 6 p.m. at the Jay Niles Memorial Library.
There will not be a regularly scheduled meeting on July 3, and the town office will be closed July 3-4 because of the holiday. The town office will also be closed June 30 for the closing of the books.
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