Standards Committee May 4, 2015

Committee: 
Standards
Meeting
Date: 
Mon, 05/04/2015 - 00:00
Agenda: 

Please add items

  1. Parameters for design standards
  2. For new website - trails database will be on web - what fields need to be included concerning standards?, e.g. what standard a trail segment meets
Attendees: 

John Magerlein, Walt Daniels, Bob Fuller, Chris Reyling, Chris Connolly, Erik Michelson, John Mack

Status of Minutes: 
Draft
Minutes: 
  1. Parameters for design standards
    Not sure what Ama intendended here so we talked more generall about policy, standards and guidelines/best practices 
  2. For new website - trails database will be on web - what fields need to be included concerning standards?, e.g. what standard a trail segment meets
    General discussion that we are not capturing all the right information in the trails database. No specific proposal.

General discussion summary:

Agreement that the 5 classes in the USFS document would the basis for our standards. Erik will produce a PDF of the 4 pages of tables from the USFS on which everyone will be asked to comment using the Acrobat Reader comment facility about how we interpret those standards and possibly areas for modifications. 

A lot of discusion about whether these were strictly design/construction standards or whether they could be interpretted as user difficulty ratings. No clear agreement on this issue, but we do recognized that whatever standards we accept will be for technical evaluation and talk to partners, and not how we present that information to the public.

The USFS standards do not cover some issues we would like to address like the aethetics of design and modification one might make for soils and usage levels.

We need to provide some exception mechanisms for existing trails that don't fit the USFS or other standards, e.g. Breakneck or the Devils Path.

Walt will provide a rough first draft of a possible 1-2 page strictly policy statement. Eventually this would be approved at the Board level, while standards and guidelines would be approved by the trail leadership.

Next meetings: June 4, Aug 6 at 4pm before Trails Council meetings. July meeting TBD, possibly a phone meeting.