Lebanon:  

Lebanon County, Conservation Group to Part Ways after Decades of Working Together

 

PENNVEST Workshop

The Delaware River Basin Source Water Collaborative is hosting a free webinar in recognition of the Drug Enforcement Administration's National Drug Take-Back Day. Please join in on the second in our ongoing series of free webinars dedicated to source water protection throughout the Delaware River Basin on Tuesday, Sept. 25, 2012, from 10 - 11:30 a.m. for "Source Water Protection and Contaminants of Emerging Concern." For more information about the National Drug Take-Back Day on Sept. 29, 2012, click here.

Be on the lookout for the Growing Greener Grant application announcement this fall! Click here for more information about the Growing Greener program.

Gather your photos, artwork and stories and help your partner schools apply for Green Education Foundation's Green Thumb Challenge grant. The deadline is September 30 to win $5,000 to keep your garden growing! This annual grant is awarded to an existing school or youth garden that has impacted the lives of students and their communities. For more information contact service@greeneducationfoundation.org.

NRCS had a report this week that a landowner received a suspicious phone call from someone claiming to work for NRCS. The caller indicated they were conducting a survey for NRCS but when the caller started to ask the landowner for Personally Identifiable Information (PII), the landowner did not continue the phone call.

The caller was not an NRCS employee. NRCS employees would never ask for PII. Employees have had extensive training and action, to secure PII. Events like this serve to remind us all of the reason for such effort in this area.

Field Office of the Future

In March, 2012, NRCS Chief Dave White and NACD President Gene Schmidt asked each state to evaluate the ability of the partnership to identify our greatest efficiencies as conservation partners and build those into a strategy for the future. In July, NRCS conducted a web-based survey of NRCS, conservation district and partner staffs to gather input and develop a paper for the "Pennsylvania Field Office of the Future."

The survey responses revealed that there are strong, professional, working relationships between partners in the Pennsylvania field offices. These relationships have developed over many years of working closely together with farmers and landowners in co-located offices. Field staff and partners said they would like to spend more time in the field working one-on-one with the farmers and landowners to develop conservation plans and provide technical and financial assistance to help put voluntary conservation on the ground. NRCS field staff and partners want to continue to be co-located to facilitate and continue their successful working relationships.

In the future, NRCS field staff and conservation district staff believes that farmers and landowners will continue to need technical assistance to implement soil conservation, manure and/or nutrient management or other activity plans and to develop new plans. In addition, field staff feels that landowners will need technical assistance to integrate all types of plans for their operation and ensure that the operation is in compliance with local, state and federal regulations.

The Department of Environmental Protection is advising consumers and businesses of new rules for recycling electronic devices that will take effect on Jan. 24, 2013.

Enacted in 2010, the Pennsylvania Covered Device Recycling Act requires that consumers not dispose of covered devices, such as computers, laptops, monitors and televisions, with their trash. This means that trash haulers will no longer be able to take covered devices unless the municipality has a curbside electronics collection program that ultimately sends the devices to an electronics recycler.