7) Community and Social Relations

Recognition is given to public interests.  The city manager has been assisted with contacts at DEQ and the Galien Soil Conservation Agency for the new McCoy Creek trail.  Use of these contacts should ensure clean water and wildlife habitat.  As for Eberly Woods, clean air, forest products, clean water, and wildlife habitat are clearly priorities.

Our management objectives have been discussed with all our adjacent landowners.  To our knowledge, all of them have approved of our ideas and practices.  Some of our neighbors even give us logs when urban trees are cut.  We return their generous offers with boards and free saplings. 

Communication and participation with public, forestry, landowner and community organizations have also occurred and will continue.  A recent example was the planting of Redbud trees, the city tree, along the parkway adjacent to our woods.  The city manager requested we assist in this endeavor.  He will be writing us a formal request, but we have already begun the planting process. 

Another example of community involvement is our ongoing arrangements with New Buffalo High School.  Students in the Advanced Placement Biology classes take nature walks in our woods.  We also conduct urban timber harvesting to with the building trades program.  These logs are transported from New Buffalo building trades sites.  They are milled, kilned, and then delivered to the site for use in the hardwood base and trim of the homes they build. 

We also have arrangements with some of the local neighborhood hunters for hunting rights to the property to assist in control of the unchecked deer population. 

To the best of our knowledge Native American sites are not present.