All right, good evening, everyone, and welcome to our committee of the whole meeting for today, December 1st, 2025.

We have a presentation from our planning department as well as about eight items on our agenda.

And then executive session for discussion of matters concerning the medical financial credit or employment history of a particular person, persons or corporation, or matters leading to the appointment, employment, promotion, demotion, discipline, suspension, dismissal, or removal of a particular person, persons or corporations, and then discussion of matters concerning proposed pending or current litigation.

So at this time, I'm gonna turn the meeting over to our city manager, Ms.

Alexander.

Good evening, Mayor and Council.

Good evening.

So first up, we have the Peak Skill Tree Inventory and Management Plan, a project update by Sarah Willie from EOCN, urban forestry consultant.

And uh do we does the planning department want to say anything before all right?

So uh Sarah Lilly is with us online, and uh if she she's not muted, so Sarah is gonna take it from here to talk to us about um this project.

Great.

Go ahead.

Thank you for having me tonight.

Are you able to see my slides?

Yes.

Yes.

Very thank you.

All right, well, I'm Sarah Lilly.

I'm an urban forestry consultant with USAN Environmental Group.

I'm just here to provide an update on your tree inventory and management plan.

And I last spoke to you all in um May of this year, so glad to be back.

So just looking at the project overall, um, this is a 100% grant funded project.

It comes from a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation Urban and Community Forestry Grant, and the main project components include the tree inventory with the data available to the city in a GIS format.

There's a community outreach component, and this all culminates in the urban forest management plan.

And the overall goals for the project, we want to understand Peak Skills Urban Forest, where the trees are, what condition they're in, how they're being managed.

We want to understand how the people of Peak Skill want to manage their trees, what they want to see in their urban forest canopy, and then develop a plan for the city for the future.

And the it's anticipated to complete the plan in the next couple of months.

Um, and this puts the city of Peakskill in a really great position because it the next round of grant funding from the state opens in the spring.

So having in place a tree inventory and a management plan sets the city up to pursue future grant funding.

So starting with the tree inventory, the data was collected in the summer months of this year, and a total of 2,373 trees, 92 stumps, and 368 planting sites were inventoried.

And for the planting sites, these were targeted to be located in the central downtown areas, since that's the location of the lowest tree canopy coverage, and great greatest heat index, and the greatest impact of newly planted trees.

The trees that were inventoried, these were located along streets within the public right of way, and they also included managed trees in parks.

So according to the grant guidelines, we were looking for trees that are publicly managed.

This did not include woodland trees.

So there are some gaps on this map to the to the right here.

Um there are a couple of large forested parks.

Unmanaged park trees were also not included, and this was just according to the grant guidelines.

They just wanted to know about the managed public trees.

So there are some significant um private developments on the east side of town whose street trees are not publicly maintained.

And here are a couple of examples at trees that were included versus trees that were not included.

On the left hand side, you can see a parcel boundary.

This is from Westchester County's GIS website.

We did include one tree along the street there, but there are a couple of trees farther back on the parcel that are not would not be included since they are privately managed trees on private property.

Similarly, on the right, this is in DePew Park.

Determining what is a managed versus an unmanaged tree in a park in general, a managed tree is one that is landscaped or mown around.

So it we did include a couple of trees along the road and this larger tree, but it does not include the unmaintained woodland areas of the park.

And we did compare Peak Skill to a 2014 survey of municipal tree care activities.

And Peekskill does have fewer public trees per person than the average Northeast City.

However, Peakskill also is much smaller than the average Northeast City.

It's about a quarter of the size of the average Northeast City and a higher population density.

So there's a lot of tree people in a smaller area and not as much room for public street trees.

Looking at a brief summary of data from the tree inventory.

10% of the trees that were identified were red maple.

And overall, maple trees made up 30% of the tree population, which is a pretty high percentage.

There were 107 unique species that were identified.

And looking at the trunk diameter of trees measured in inches, this is a good facsimile for the age of the tree population.

There aren't many newly planted trees out there in the one to two inch caliper size.

And overall, we did find 49 dead trees, but in general, the tree population is in fair to good condition.

Moving ahead to the community engagement portion of the project.

So this started with an Arbor Day tree planting event.