2020 October Safety Committee Minutes

  1. Office & Department Directory
  2. Environmental Health and Safety
  3. 2020 October Safety Committee Minutes

MINUTES OF ST. LAWRENCE UNIVERSITY SAFETY COMMITTEE

HELD AT DIANA TORREY HEALTH AND COUNSELING CENTER, CONFERENCE ROOM

ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2020 STARTING AT 8:00 AM.

 

Chairperson:      Patrick Gagnon, Co-Chair

 

Present:              Nick Ormasen, Co-Chair, Susan Johnson, Secretary, Mary Charleston,

                            Stacie Olney-LaPierre, Marcus Sherburne Ethan Townsend, Kasarian Dane,

    Jim Kozsan, Sharmela Garcia-Martin, Bill Ritchie and Traci Grainger

 

Apologies:          Suna Stone, Tim Kinch, Dan Seaman, Stacy Vassar, Marsha Sawyer,

                            Timothy Corbitt, Jill Pflugheber, Steve Richards and David Geleta

  

Open comments, introductions and guests

Approval of the Minutes

New Business:

  1. Nick Ormasen will now be co-chair of the Safety Committee
  2. Ken McGowan, NYSOFPC will be conducting fire inspections of academic buildings starting Monday, October 5th; this will take approximately 2-3 weeks at which time they will move on to residence halls. They will be entering rooms and will have masks and gloves on.
  3. Pat gave an update on COVID on campus and Security.
  4. Ethan inquired about the trip policy; requests need to be made to John O’Connor and should not be more than 90 miles away from campus. The old metric of outside county is no longer in place. In addition, the fleet vehicles have had decrease in capacity to conform with social distancing requirements. When the vans return; the group is required to clean and disinfect them with the supplies kept in the vehicles.
  5. The sandbanks will remain closed; requests for academic and training purposes can be forwarded to Pat Gagnon for review. The restrictions are leading to successes.
  6. Pat and local law enforcement will be holding a meet and greet in the Winston Room on Police Reform.

 

Old Business:

Tabled:

  1. Review Integrated Pest Management Plan –Needs to be reviewed/revised. Last updated in 2006. This is located on the EH&S Website. The suggestion of a sub-committee was discussed and potential members will be contacted. Suna will be taking the lead and recruiting members from Biology, ENVS, Facilities Building Manager and Marcus Sherburne. Hoping to have updated draft ready for Committee review next semester. Discussed EAB plan (Emerald Ash Borer). There are 6,000 in the wooded areas and 213 on campus. The plan is to remove as the trees die out. Suna to bring revisions to next meeting November 1st.  November 1st meeting was cancelled due to storm; Suna not in attendance at December 6, 2019 meeting; committee hopes to discuss and review at next meeting February 7, 2020. Suna not in attendance at February 7, 2020 meeting. Marcus advocates streamlining the current document, as there is a lot of information in there that needs to be replaced; much editing to do and at this time, the plan refers mostly to grounds and needs to incorporate the entire campus. He hopes that he and Suna can have something for February/March 2021 meeting. In preparing for ash borer it takes 21 years for total destruction; Marcus will be planning on a 12 year plan and replace instead of treating as the treating process has a 95% failure rate just delaying destruction that will happen anyway. It is cheaper to replace the trees than treat them.

 

  1. Shelter in Place Drill – Drill has been postponed; AVP Gagnon to speak with Faculty Council on October 15th.  There is a need to exercise notifier; people need to see it and it gives people that miss the message a chance to register their cell numbers in order to receive messages. Heading towards utilizing RAVE system, which turns every subscriber’s cell phone into an emergency blue light phone; Associated Colleges participate in the RAVE program enabling them to receive and send their messages to all four colleges. Waiting to be put on Faculty Council agenda.  Faculty Council recently reached out and Pat will request to get on their agenda in the Fall. Drills like this bring out the vulnerabilities in people. After the first drill AVP Gagnon received 25+ concerns with areas on campus and he addressed each one of them going to their space to meet and work out scenarios with them. Pat talked to Judith Nagel-Myers and they agreed it would not be a good idea to conduct a shelter in place drill at this time. They will plan for something when we are COVID clear (fingers crossed). Security will utilize Everbridge system to do a semester alert notification and Traci suggested a reminder of key points of a SIP drill go out to the campus community.

 

  1. Sharmela – concern of people walking up to service animals and trying to pet them or asking owner if they can pet them and becoming put off and irritated when told “no.” The campus community needs to be educated on the difference between service animals and emotional support animals; the proper etiquette, etc. They are legally not required to mark the service animals. Service animals are allowed anywhere on campus; emotional support animals are allowed in the dorm room and leashed walking on campus. This prompted the committee to discuss the University Pet Policy, which will be reviewed at a future meeting. Pet Policy needs to be rebuilt and a committee has been formed: Sharmela Garcia-Martin, Stacie Olney-LaPierre and Pat Gagnon. They will be meeting in the next couple of weeks to begin the process and will bring update to next Safety Committee meeting, November 6th at 8:00 a.m.

 

 

It is requested that any new business to be added to the Agenda be forwarded to Susan Johnson no later than October 28th, 2020.

 

There being no further business, the meeting closed.

 

Meeting Adjourned at 8:45 a.m.

Future Meetings:

 

Meetings will be held via Zoom from 8am-9am. Dates of future meetings will continue to be the first Friday of the month: 11/6/2020, 12/4/2020, 1/8/2021, 2/5/2021, 3/5/2021, 4/2/2021, 5/7/2021 and 6/4/2021