Minutes of December 2008

December 16, 2008
East Montpelier, Vermont

Meeting was called to order at 7:40 pm with eight (8) members present.

Secretary's report was read. Pat M made motion to accept. Motion seconded by Denny G. Motion carried.


Treasurer's report was read. Derek Pryce made motion to accept. Motion seconded by Jeff Parker. Motion carried.


VAST:
-Veterans ride happening in Waitsfield – Leaving from Kenyon’s
-Barre City winter event is happening – RailRoad beds will be groomed for machines to get into town – Two day event.
-SnoBees missing a sign post which was new last year – someone cut it off at ground level.
-Cabot grooming is settled – Marshfield is taking on most of it – about 15 miles
-Worcester had found and cut a new trail near Dumpling, only to learn they were not on the land that belonged to the land owner who gave them permission. This is back on hold now.
-Border-2-Border ride is going to happen again this year.
-A few towns are now adding to the appraisal value is the VAST trail crosses the land. There was only one town to begin with, now there are four or five.
-Work on the Montpelier trail is done for this year. Many letters were written - some in the paper, some not. We need to be cautious when working around the hiking trails
-We got a permit for the crossing on County Rd. A culvert was install with about 4 loads of material to cover it.


Trails:
-All the trails are marked.
-Gates will be opened – most are now.
-The bridges at Hawkins and Fitch’s are both completed.
-Three bridges need to be checked on – Frost’s, the Hell Hole and Woodards.
-Piston Bully is ready to go.
-We are still waiting to have the drag welded up.
-Our Fuel tank is about half full
-There was a washout between Codling Rd and Hawkins. The culvert was pulled back into place. Hawkins donated about three yards of material to fix.

Misc:
-Five day passes are only sold out of the VAST office. Last year they needed to sell about 2500 of them and only sold about 500. This year they could not find anyone to do insurance through, so the pass comes with no included insurance.
-Four years ago the county bought the sheriff department two new machines (2 strokes). This year they wanted to upgrade both machine to 4 strokes. They leave these machines running a lot on the trail so they can have their lights and stuff going. They were told that the 4 strokes would not be as good for this because they will overheat is left at an idle for too long. They think they can run led lights to lessen the load. The county bought them one new machine – the other two are still there, so they have three now.
-Website had to be moved as L9 no longer hosts sites. It was moved to GoDaddy. The backend database had to be changed from Postgres to MySQL – no other changes were needed. It is working fine. Derek is working on getting the new membership application forms in shape.
-We will be plowing the parking lot again this year with the Piston Bully as we go through. SnoBees agreed to do the same last year, but didn’t do it.


Henry Murray made motion to adjourn. Motion seconded by Jeff Parker. Meeting adjourned at 8:25 pm.