For those interested, here is the text of my remarks at Lincoln Town Meeting yesterday.

Mary Lincoln, Chair, Lincoln Conservation Commission

When we announced the change in dog walking policy for the Mt. Misery conservation area, we anticipated that some people would welcome the change while others would not. It wasn’t until a few days ago that we realized a group of people was organizing to bring the discussion to Town Meeting. In the interest of allowing the town to conduct the business appropriately before the meeting, we have decided to delay implementation of the leash requirement at Mt. Misery until after we hold a public hearing, which will be on April 27^th, to provide an appropriate forum for people to express their views, pro and con, on our proposed changes.

While we will not implement the new regulations at Mt. Misery until after the meeting on April 27th, we will be asking dog walkers to clean up after their dogs. We ask that people bring empty plastic bags from home and return home with the full ones. We are also asking that dog walkers continue to comply with the principles of dog-walking etiquette that we have publicized consistently over the past four years. At Mt. Misery, as on our all conservation land, dogs must be under control of their owners at all times. Under control means the dog must be within the owner’s sight and hearing and come immediately when called. Dogs should stay on marked trails, especially at this time of year when the most damage can occur on muddy, saturated ground.

Many consider Mt. Misery the premier property in our nearly 2,000 acres of conservation land. The area has some particularly important natural resources, including the kettlehole vernal pool, the ponds and streams, rocky outcrop vegetation on the summit, interior forest supporting ground nesting birds such as wood thrush and oven birds, and an important stretch of floodplain habitat along the Sudbury River, a federally designated “Wild and Scenic” river.

At the same time, the Mt. Misery area is the most heavily used parcel of conservation land in the town. Hundreds of dogs and their owners visit every week. There is hardly a daylight hour of any day when there are not at least 2 or 3 cars in the parking lot off 117. A congenial community of dog walkers has formed and these people enjoy the companionship of each other and each others dogs. While it is a fact that we have received an increasing number of reports of unpleasant or dangerous encounters with unleashed dogs, for the most part the dogs who visit and their owners are friendly and well behaved. While no single dog or person has a significant effect on the land and the ecosystem it supports, the cumulative impact of this number of dogs is evident. Compared with other conservation parcels in town, the trails at Mt. Misery are wider and more compacted, the underbrush more sparse, and wildlife less abundant.

This is a trend that has been steady yet inexorable. Particularly since other conservation organizations have instituted leash laws or banned dogs altogether, the number of dog walkers at Mt. Misery has grown to the point where the commission felt gentle reminders of appropriate dog-walking etiquette were no longer sufficient. The environmental degradation of the Mt. Misery area has been a concern of ours for at least 5 or 6 years and anyone who looks at our meeting agendas or reads our minutes will see that we have discussions of this issue periodically and fairly regularly in our open meetings. We regularly receive both positive and negative input from users of the Mt. Misery area. In the end, and after four years of mulling it over and discussing it, it was our judgment that in order to reduce the impact of dogs on the fragile resources and to allow for the enjoyment of other users, we needed to require that dogs be leashed. We knew this would make some people very happy, and it has, and that it would also make some people very unhappy, and it has done that, too.

Let me address a few issues that have been raised over the last week or so. A letter has been circulated questioning the Conservation Commission’s authority to promulgate these regulations. Under the Conservation Commission Act (Mass General Laws Chapter 40 section 8C) the Conservation Commission is responsible for managing town owned conservation lands. Under the statute, which has been on the books since the late 1950s, a town may form a Conservation Commission to “acquire, maintain, improve, protect, limit the future use of or otherwise conserve and properly utilize open spaces in land and water areas.” The statute further authorizes the commission to “adopt rules and regulations governing the use of land and waters under its control, and prescribe penalties, not exceeding a fine of one hundred dollars, for any violation thereof.”

The statute does not require notice or hearings, and in the past the LLCT and Conservation Commission have cooperated to promulgate regulations jointly that apply to all the lands in town, both town-owned and LLCT-owned. These regulations are summarized on trail maps, printed in the LLCT Trail Guide to Lincoln Conservation Land, and available in the Conservation office.

As I mentioned earlier, regulations currently in place require that dogs be under control on all parcels of conservation land. In addition, we do have a town bylaw requiring that dog owners exercise responsibility so that their animals do not unreasonably impinge upon the activities of other persons. To me, this means that if a person tells me she is afraid of my dog, I don’t tell her not to worry, he’s friendly (which he is) but I make every effort to keep my dog away from her. If I have to put him on leash that’s fine. If I have to install invisible fencing to keep him from roaming the neighborhood, that’s fine too.

Another issue that is being brought up is the fact the Mt. Misery lands were purchased with state and federal funds as well as local funds. Lands purchased with public funds must be open to all persons in the Commonwealth for passive recreation. However, the Commission is still the entity responsible for the stewardship of these lands and as such may limit use or limit access as necessary to protect the land and the ecosystem it supports, so long as we do not discriminate or give priority to our own residents.

Finally, I want to mention that the Conservation Commission and the LLCT are responsible for nearly 70 miles of trails on about 2,000 acres of conservation land in town. We do this with one full time land manager, one part-time year round ranger (who works only 16 hours a week and does not get benefits), and one or two seasonal rangers, usually college students. LLCT has no full time staff but usually hires one or two trail workers (who are not rangers or enforcement personnel) during the summers as well. These are fewer people than we’ve had in the past while usage of our lands is increasing. At every opportunity we remind the town that we cannot maintain the desired level of maintenance or enforcement over the long term at these staffing levels. In the past few years we have struggled to comply with the Finance Commmittee’s directives to maintain level funding and have done so through a combination of cutting funds for supplies and eating into the budget for seasonal help. And before someone says, “why don’t you have volunteers do some of this work,” I’ll respond that organizations who use volunteers successfully invariably have a staff person who does nothing but coordinate those volunteers. And I’ll remind you that we do hold volunteer work days periodically, and these are successful when the weather is good and there aren’t too many scheduling conflicts.

It is important to us that any so-called compromise solution to the problems at Mt. Misery be one that is light on administrative requirements and above all, enforceable. Many land managers have warned us that leash laws are not enforceable, as dog owners tend to let their dogs off leash as soon as the enforcer is out of sight. Total dog bans, they tell us, are much easier to enforce. We are trying to find a way that dog owners can continue to enjoy Mt. Misery while still managing the land in a responsible way in order to insure that future generations can enjoy it as well. We had hoped, perhaps naively, that the dog community would understand that and cooperate with our efforts by voluntarily complying with the new regulations.

The meeting on April 27^th will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Donaldson Room at the Town Office Building on Lincoln Road.