HomeMy WebLinkAboutJuly 8, 2025 Tree Board Minutes from the
Jeffersonville Tree Board
July 8, 2025
In attendance:
Jeff Cover, Carol Dunn, Bob Hill, Kelli Jones, Amber Powell, Chad Reischl, Derrick
Wiest
Not in attendance: Eric Bitner, Chloe Motley, Heaven Williams, Paul Reid,
The meeting of the Jeffersonville Tree Board was called to order by Jeff Cover at 4:03
pm on July 8, 2025 in the Planning/Building/Parks conference room at the Jeffersonville
City Hall
The agenda was approved by assent. The minutes had accidentally not been sent out in
advance, so they were tabled to the next meeting.
The first item on the agenda was a short discussion on any takeaways/implications of
the Eocene urban forestry report. The main takeaways noted were that:
• The city does not have designated forestry staff so there might be some
opportunities for the tree board to take a more active role in tree care and
maintenance,
• That there it may be important for the Tree Board to advocate for additional staff
dedicated to this purpose.
The second item was our planned 90-day review of the bylaws. Jeff noted a couple
items that he was interested in looking at in the agenda. Discussion was as follows
• Rotational elections (article 4.1) — the board felt this may need addressing, the
consensus was to change everyone to 2-year terms and stagger the
Council/Mayor appointed members and the voluntary members between years —
that way there would always be some consistency. Jeff indicated that he'd work
on some language and bring it back to the board.
• Treasurer (4.5) — it was asked if we should strike the words "and if." Chad felt
that the wording should stay as we don't have a full grasp on the financial picture
of this organization yet.
• Committees (4.7) — when asked if we should list the committees, the board
decided it was best not to, as they may change from time to time.
Jeff asked if there were any other suggestions, but seeing none, we moved on.
Moving to new business, Jeff presented the Board with the draft mission statement that
was drafted by the executive committee. There was much discussion about the
statement, and a number of changes were agreed upon. Jeff agreed to make the
appropriate changes with the help of the executive committee members and bring this
back in august.
Before moving to committee reports, Jeff mentioned that we need to define a point
person to convene each of these committees.
First up was the education/programming/tree planting committee. Bob informed us that
he'd spoken with the paper about writing a monthly column, he just wasn't sure when to
start that. Consensus was that we might need to put a few other items in place before
starting. Carol spoke of her desire to bring the DNR's tree steward program to
Jeffersonville. It's an easy and effective way to build capacity for tree care in the area.
Chad once again brought up the (website cityofjeff.net/tree-resources) as a way we can
start to provide more info about the tree board. He can add information about the tree
board to the site and/or create a new page just for the tree board. He's open to
suggestions as to content for the site. Someone suggested creating a Gmail account so
we can have a point of contact and google drive space to store docs and such. Folks
seemed to agree that this was a good idea. Maybe we should put that in place before
doing other marketing. Jeff asked Carol if she would formally head up this committee
and she volunteered to do so.
Afterward we moved onto the Marketing committee. The marketing committee
suggested that it was probably too soon to try and get to neighborhood night out, but
that they would like to focus on Steamboat nights on October 3rd and 4th — especially as
it gets a lot more folks in one place. The committee thought that it would be great to
have an art activity around trees and be able to hand out cards with information/links to
the tree board website and contact info. Amber felt that parks may have some money to
assist with this project. The marketing committee will continue to work on this. Amber
volunteered to spearhead this committee.
The last committee to report back was the finance committee. The committee hadn't
met, but the board discussed the need to determine how to accept dollars and how to
approach Council for some funds related to the Board. Jeff asked Chad to spearhead
this committee and they would meet soon to hammer out some plans.
With that, Jeff reiterated the newly assigned committee chairs. Carol for
education/programming, Amber for marketing, Chad for Finance.
The meeting was adjourned at 5:10pm.
Respectfully Submitted,
Chad Reischl
Secretary,
Jeffersonville Tree Board.
I