Comm No 0035.30 - Testimony - CA-18 - PONC Maintenance fund

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Sensenig testimony, p. 2 children outdoors, gives satisfying work to young adults, and which gives older people a chance to exercise and share their experience. Stewardship can mean education, rehabilitation, and joy that really changes communities for the better. Some examples of creative stewardship 1 have been involved in include permaculture demonstration gardens, students adopting trails and organizing themselves to maintain them, outdoor classrooms, young people reintegrating from jail into society by working on restorative justice projects on preserves, nature walks to identify and learn about native plants and wildlife, and farm days where the public can come and harvest food from protected land. To have this level of community involvement you have to have paid staff. Even on its most basic level, all -volunteer stewardship of protected lands isn't appropriate because it is simply insufficient for the amount of work that needs to be done over long periods of time, let alone the work that CAN be done if the land is to be honored as we hope it will be. And it isn't fair to the land. itself. We can't afford to allow degradation of protected land, and reliance on strictly volunteer work increases the risk of land not being cared for properly. We need to be realistic, and the proposed change to CA -18 is a flexible answer. Thank you!