- Hi everybody, Oh boy, I've been dreading spreading the word on this one. When I got back from vacation there was this lovely email from Jeff the parks guy in St Peters: Susan, it was decided that to allow geocaching on city property we will need a Certificate of Insurance and issue a permit to the organization or user. With this information, I would recommend that you remove the caches on St. Peters property. I look forward to discussing this activity with you again when the insurance requirements can be met. I replied to him that I would request that all caches be disabled while we considered our options. Right now I don't think that just appealing to the parks people again would be very productive. I sought the advice of those wise geocaching gurus RGS and Brawny. Here's roughly what we came up with. I have emailed the owners of SP caches asking that they voluntarily disable their caches as a sign of good faith and cooperation with the city. I have disabled my own caches with a note briefly explaining the situation. I encouraged the cache owners and now am encouraging any cachers who are RESIDENTS of SP to contact their elected officials (aldermen), introduce them to geocaching and make the point that we pay the taxes for the parks and yet are not being allowed to use them. Also that our hobby is an individual activity, not unlike rollerblading, running, sledding, etc. All these activities are allowed without restriction in the parks and if an individual belongs to a skating club, cycling club etc, that club is not required to provide insurance for the individual activities of its members. Still, the main point to me is that I pay taxes and my hobby is far safer than a lot of what goes on in the parks, but we're being singled out because geocaching is new and takes some effort to understand. This might sound bad, but I would also discourage anyone who is not a SP resident from contacting the city. SP gets pretty darn defensive against "outsiders" and it just wouldn't be helpful at this point. Anyway, guys, I've done about all I can do for now. I forget who I've told, but I'm taking a class this fall for the first time in 20 years. It's a very demanding class and also very important to the future of my career. So my meeting with any alderman is going to have to wait for quite a while. If anyone wants to pick up the crusade and run with it, that would be wonderful, but I just don't have the mental energy or time to deal with it now. Sorry it turned out like this. I guess for future reference, this may be important to think about when we approach other land use managers. I really didn't anticipate this obssession with liability. Well, let the SP-bashing begin. Susan **************************************** Our WebPage! Http://WWW.GeoStL.com Mail List Info. //www.freelists.org/cgi-bin/list?list_id=geocaching Mail List FAQ's: //www.freelists.org/help/questions.html **************************************** To unsubscribe from this list: send an email to geocaching-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject field