Quinte West council is continuing to take aim at the gypsy moth problem.
At Monday’s council meeting, council reaffirmed its commitment to reaching out to nearby municipalities to push for a regional approach on spraying to combat the problem.
Chief Administrative Officer David Clazie told council he’d been in contact with representatives of Hastings County as well as Belleville and Prince Edward County.
The focus of the conversation Monday was trying to collect as much detailed data as possible before the fall to form an effective potential spraying program.
Director of Public Works and Environmental Services Chris Angelo referred to conversations he had with representatives of the Town of Pelham and how important data collection was to their spraying program.
“I think going forward, I’m going to suggest this to all of you, we need to really document. I know we have a plan where we’ve asked residents to pin their locations but we need a lot more data than that. I’ve talked at length with the Town of Pelham that actually instituted a bit of a spraying program and they actually engaged a consultant that looked at defoliation maps and they evaluated individual properties that had been impacted and came up with egg mass sizes, the number of eggs on trees and then made a recommendation to their council to look at thresholds on where the town would spray and would not spray.”
Director Angelo said that decisions would need to be made by or before the fall in order to set up a potential spraying program for spring of 2022, when it would be most effective.
Council directed staff to make a report on data collection and the options that lie ahead to deal with the issue.
