August 18, 2016

Statement from our Town Engineer Jonathan Theisse, regarding the current condition of the park landscaping...

All,

 The responsibility for the maintenance of the streetscape area still rests with the contractor.  He had scheduled to get a crew here early last week – that did not happen.  He will have a crew at Filley tomorrow to mow the lawn areas and weed the beds.  He was informed today that if he does not stay on top of the maintenance in the future, we will make other arrangements and bill him for our costs.

 Obviously, to anyone who has been at the park, the grass establishment has significant issues.  The contractor has done much work both for Bloomfield and other communities.  These issues are not typical.  However, he obviously had a very poor batch of seed that was used for the park.  It was also an extremely rough spring to attempt to establish new grass.  When the fall planting season arrives, the contractor is going to have to go back and re-establish the lawn areas.  That is the reason that the erosion control measures have remained in place.  There really wasn’t anything that the contractor could do about it during the hot, dry summer months (other than mow, which he hasn’t kept up on – and I have not been as diligent as called for to get him to stay on top of it).  To try to address the weed problem without a good grass stand would have just left bare ground subject to erosion – and more weeds establishing in the same locations.

 The goose situation is what it is for the time being, unfortunately.  There are measures included in the final stages of the dredging/dam relocation/stream restoration phase of the project designed to address the issue.  The pond and stream edges will limit the amount of lawn grass directly adjacent to the pond and add other features that are supposed to make them uncomfortable with the transition from the water to land.  Also, we are including some goose-eye-height high frequency lights that have proven successful in many instances.  However, such measures tend to have the most success if they are implemented after some type of major disruption to the geese, when they are looking to re-establish.  To put that measure in place now, or earlier this summer, might have significantly reduced the effectiveness of the measure long term. 

 In the meantime, we will look to regularly wash the sidewalk and plaza areas through the rest of summer and the fall; and will research temporary measures to try to deter them.  (Although I don’t hold out a lot of hope of finding anything that will have much success.)  Trying to control geese is a major problem for parks, golf courses, and like locations with water features.  There are many professed solutions available; but few that have shown any reliable success.  Staff and our design consultant has done much research on the issue.  Getting the public to not feed the geese is always huge.  Besides that, the most successful measure appears to be hiring a service to regularly “patrol” the area with trained dogs; but this is very expensive.  The other most successful measure is running wires above the water surface – which is not very practical for a park with a pond as its central feature.  The lights mentioned above seems to show the most promise of the more practical available measures.