Meetings and Events

Fly Tying Night and Western Montana Sojourn!   Thursday January 7, 2010 Steak House Restaurant, Barre-Montpelier Road, BerlinDinner 6:00 pm;  Meeting: 7:00 pm

REGULAR MEETINGS:

Chapter meetings resume each November and run each month through the following April. Our concluding event is the Chapter Banquet. We meet on the 1st Thursday of the month. Meetings start at 7:00 P.M. Please plan to arrive around 6:00 P.M. and have a meal at The Steak House! They don’t charge us for the meeting space so the least we can do is to patronize them for dinner!

Our regular venue for monthly meetings is the The Steak House Restaurant on the Barre/Montpelier Road in Berlin, Vermont.  This is Vermont Route 302 approximately 3/4 to a 1 mile from the junction with US Route 2.

Not a TU or MadDog Chapter Member? You are invited nevertheless, but please click on the JOIN button above!

PROJECTS/Grants: Following a public input process consisting of landowner contacts, press releases, a public meeting and many direct contacts the Department of Fish and Wildlife has re-evaluated the initial Test Water Regulation proposal for the Dog River and provided the following recommendation to Commissioner Laroche.   Location: Northfield Falls in Northfield downstream to the Junction Road Bridge in Montpelier (~8.1 miles) Daily Limit: 0, all fish must be released immediately Gear: Artificial flies and lures only Time Period: April 10, 2010 – October 31, 2015   The Commissioner has approved the regulation which will take effect this April.  Thanks to all of you who have participated in these discussions and feel free to contact me for updates or other questions.  Hopefully we’ll see a turn around in this important wild trout resource in the near future.

Small Hydro Talking Points Small hydro talking points   History: Three years ago - What the small hydro advocates wanted was to lower the by pass standard to allow drought flow conditions and the panel said no, the law is the law and the legislature's responsibility is to protect the waters of the state, not to permit hydro advocates to create drought conditions.   Two years ago advocates had legislation passed that required ANR to do two studies. 1) List potential hydro sites. Such a list was already in hand and verified through a previous study. 2) A study to discover if there were short cut environmental impact study methodologies to evaluate hydro impacts. The finding was that because the environment is so variable there are no short cut approaches to evaluating hydro impacts.   Now comes H130 - An act relating to requiring appropriate mitigation, instead of denial, with respect to the impacts of new renewable energy projects on flora, fauna, or habitat.   What small hydro advocates want is to change the rules which currently require denial of harmful hydro projects.   Is mitigation possible? According to Tim Hess, former, head of the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Depts., Fisheries Program, "After a lifetime of work as a fisheries biologist with two states and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, I can assure you that there is no possible truly complete mitigation for energy projects that dam or divert the flow of rivers and streams."   Now comes S190 - AN ACT RELATING TO ESTABLISHING A GENERAL PERMIT FOR THE CERTIFICATION OF HYDROELECTRIC PROJECTS   Implication - This is an attempt to grant a general permit rather than the currently required permitting process that studies each proposed site based on its unique merits. This is an attempt to circumvent appropriate studies, as required under the VT Water Quality Standards and the federal Clean Water Act.   Who benefits from small hydro dams and who pays the cost? David Deen is the Head of the House Fish, Wildlife and Natural Resources Committee, a Representative from Westminster and chair of the VT Dams Task Force. He said, " All of the affordable and sustainable hydro sites have already been developed and not only do those now being proposed need the "environmental" subsidy of killing off life in the by pass reaches with drought flows but the projects need cash subsidies from the standard offer, ARRA funds, CDBG funds, tax payer dollars to support the infra structure of dams and even at that they are not sustainable and the dams and hydro facilities will likely (based on our experience with this same approach to the same issue in the 1970-80s) become unsafe, unproductive and abandoned at the end of the cash subsidies.

2009-2010 MadDog TU Meeting Presentors:

January 2010: Fly Tying Night! Also lining up a surprise presenter!

February 2010: Fly Fishing Alaska; Presenter: Paul Zuchowski, from Central VT TU

March 2010: Fishing Western New York with fly fishing guide Drew Price with emphasis on the Oak Orchard River

April 2010: Fishing Idaho for Steelhead with TU's own Joe Norton