The plan to heat the village of Fleischmanns with a communal wood boiler will live or die on community buy-in, according to Jim Waters, the director of the Catskill Forest Association (CFA), which is spearheading the proposed project.
Waters gave a presentation about the village's plan to switch from oil heat to a community wood-fired boiler on Saturday, February 1. Videographer Jessica Vecchione was onhand, and put together a short video about the meeting, above.
"If you have a hundred different businesses and family homes that feed into this and buy into this, then it will work," said Waters at the meeting. "So it's up to the community whether they want this project to work or not."
He added that switching the village's fuel source from oil to wood chips would create a market for a locally-produced wood that would help Catskills landowners maintain healthier forests.
"We have a huge amount of land out there that can be managed," Waters said at the meeting. "But [the landowners] need a market to sell crummy trees into."
The Catskill Forest Association, which is spearheading the Fleischmanns community biomass project, is a Watershed Post advertiser.
