2012 Annual Friends Meeting Summary

Our first Annual Membership Meeting was held on January 23rd. The Annual Membership meetings are held to welcome Friends of Mianus River Park members to meet the Board of Directors and understand what the Friends have accomplished over the past year, goals for the coming years, as well as an opportunity to give feedback and input to the Board.

Some of the Board's biggest accomplishments for 2011 were:

• Signage - The Friends worked with Town & City Land Managers to develop and install park signage that makes it clear that the park is a valuable community asset.
• 501 (c) 3 Organized - With a formally organized non-profit status and Board of Directors we've established the framework for a lasting and effective group that can help sustain the park for future generations.
• Contributed over 400 volunteer hours of trail and riverbank maintenance to the park through regular Monthly Trail Maintenance Days, our National Trails Day event, and mid-week volunteers sessions.

Our goal remains: To Sustain and Protect the Mianus River Park for all users and future generations

Our big goals for 2012:

• Provide more sustainable hardened river access points to help alleviate erosion and destruction of the river bank while maintaining recreational access.
• Develop a comprehensive, Park-specific, river bank management and rehabilitation plan with assistance from Trout Unlimited and professional firms.
• Increase Friends of Mianus River Park membership and create new, exciting, non-trail work volunteer activities.

Some of the notable feedback we received from our members:

• Lower parking lot needs improvement as it is confusing and is becoming heavily eroded - The Friends will engage the City on this topic over 2012 to understand planning efforts already underway and determine where we can help the City fund raise or provide input and direction on the design.
• Down stream erosion is an issue - As use of the park has picked up some of our neighbors/members have noted the river floods are more extreme and that water depths (channel capacity) are generally lower than in past 20 years as a layer of soil/sand has been deposited along the river bottom.
  
  The Friends has been very aware of the erosion issues immediately in the park, however given the downstream impacts it adds a further sense of urgency to our goal of rehabilitating/stabilizing and sustaining the river bank areas of the park.