SOUTH ORANGE, NJ — South Orange Environmental Commission Chairman Bill Haskins presented the South Orange Board of Trustees with the commission’s 2020 budget at its Dec. 9 meeting, outlining its plans for the year ahead. The commission asked the village for $10,500, which will be added to the $16,051.50 in grants it has either received or will receive next year as well as any donations made to the commission.
“In 2020 we’ll have about $16,000 in grant funding,” Haskins said at the meeting. “Some of the grants we got this year carry through to next year. The major one is $9,000 from New Jersey Urban Community Forestry, but that won’t come to us until 2020. We’re working on an application right now for another Sustainable Jersey grant, which would probably be in the neighborhood of $4,000.”
In his presentation, Haskins broke down what the Environmental Commission will do with the $10,500 it requested from the village. A portion of the funds will go to sponsoring River Day, the annual spring cleanup of the Rahway River, which runs through Meadowbrook Park. Some of the money will maintain grant projects, while the rest will go toward printing costs, promotions and signage for the commission. In addition, Haskins would like to hire an intern in 2020.
“The big thing I’d like to do in this budget next year is to get an intern to work to update the Environmental Resource Inventory,” he said. “We’re asking to have that at $3,600. They would work with Kirk Barrett, who’s on the Green Team and did this professionally.”
The Environmental Resource Inventory is an index of natural resources and green initiatives in South Orange. It was last updated in 2009.
“We can get a great update to our Environmental Resource Inventory, which we could actually use to get grants,” Haskins said. “We could possibly pursue a grant to get the intern as well.”
The budget also highlighted the tree-inventory project, for which the Environmental Commission has partnered with Seton Hall University students to catalog every tree on public property in South Orange. SHU is paying for computer software to track each tree and will continue to do so in 2020. Haskins said Environmental Commission members would like to see approximately 50 percent of the trees in the village accounted for by next year. Right now, approximately 10 percent have been logged, a total of 1,200 trees.
Trustee Walter Clarke, who is the liaison to the Environmental Commission, said the tree-inventory project is a good tool South Orange can use in fighting climate change.
“It’s actually a countermeasure, and knowing how many trees we actually have and their ages, et cetera, allows us to know exactly the benefits they’re giving back to us,” he said at the meeting.
Trustee Donna Coallier asked Haskins how South Orange is affected by the Paris Agreement, which regulates greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, and was signed by 196 countries in 2016. Haskins said that updating the Environmental Resource Inventory could address this.
“In 2009, a lot of it focused on transportation and walkability,” he said. “But there’s no section at all on climate change. So that could be for an intern, making a section on climate change and what it means in South Orange.”
After the budget presentation, village President Sheena Collum praised Haskins and the other commissioners for the work they do in South Orange.
“South Orange doesn’t have a division of sustainability,” she said. “We don’t have a dedicated employee who works on these types of initiatives, so I would say with Trustee Clarke, with the volunteers, with the small pittance we give to the Environmental Commission, we get by far the biggest bang for our buck out of the existing groups. We appreciate all the volunteers we see every day doing stuff for our town.”
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