Plan? What Plan?

Can you call it a plan?

First of all most of the content came from Granville a small rural town, add a new front page, throw in some Solon graphs and viola, you have a comprehensive custom Solon plan.  Kraus put this on the record at the last Safety Meeting.

And if copying from Granville weren't enough, they ask ODOW and USDA WS to edit the plan.  These two organizations depend on lethal methods for their budget, hardly an unbiased source.

But where's the meat?  No specifics, no implementation, no costs, no action plan.  What is council "deciding"?  They'll be "adopting" an idea, leaving the implementation to Stanek, an avid hunter.

Stanek was asked last month to obtain a cost for someone else (USDA WS) implementing the whole plan.  Stanek did not do that.  Russo reminded him of that request.

Kraus tried to remove bow hunting, Russo objected and wanted to recommend the "plan" to council.

Kraus asked about competitors to White Buffalo, Stanek said that there aren't many competitors, not with their "credentials" who would do it as "professionally".  But then Stanek admitted that if we were to consider White Buffalo, we may want to "exclude an individual", seeming to admit that the city has a problem with someone from White Buffalo.

Russo was concerned that they act in time to get this done this year.

1. The first action would be "public education" and we've started that.  I think that is the "deer damage" form and MetroParks link on the city's home page.
2. Next would be to start bow hunting late Sept 2011.
3. Culling effort would begin early 2012.

At 58 min in, Russo put his foot down to discourage "cherry picking" and pushed for sending the "plan" to council tonight.  Kraus made a last ditch effort to not "recommend".  Russo made the motion to recommend.  Kraus clarified that he voted NO because of bow hunting.

For the original plan, twice updated since, see this article.

At the last safety meeting where the plan was unveiled, the "Deer Park" was removed because if we feed deer, ODOW will not grant a license to kill deer and Russo was insistent about needing to kill deer.

At this meeting, the following changes were made:

1. On pg 6, A disclaimer that if there are "too many" deer they'll eat anything, so even deer resistant planting could be deemed ineffective.  Reinforcing the idea that killing is required.
2. On pg 9, #2, Fixed a typo saying that a method was impracticable.
3. Emphasized that "Trap and Euthinize" (Captive Bolt) requires an ODOW permit and that the city must be involved and that residents can't directly approach the ODOW to get a permit.
4. Both Peters of the ODOW and USDA WS suggested that we are "over regulating" bow hunting.  Stanek believes this is "absolutely necessary" in the beginning because of citizens concerns.  This regulation can be viewed as safe guards to the residents.  Then in the next breath, Stanek contradicted himself and got the committee to pass an amendment adding that we would "follow ODOW standards in use in neighboring communities" (who don't "over regulate" to protect their citizens).

The meeting video can be found here, the deer topic runs from 37 min to 1 hour 1 min.

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