Allan Appel Photo
Jason Sanchez’s poster, illustrating the city “Pick It Up” slogan, was selected from a pool of more than 300 entrants.
A campaign to clean up New Haven produced the following results:
• Compliments from potential developers about how neat New Haven looks.
• About 426,000 pounds of garbage picked up in the 27 square blocks of downtown over the past six months.
• A new slogan, “Pick It Up,” festooned on posters, in schools, and soon on the sides of the city’s street sweepers.
• Committers of low-level crimes performing 1100 hours of community service specifically picking up trash and removing graffiti instead of going to jail.
* Sherwin Williams paint stores providing qualifying city residents free graffiti removal kits to do the job themselves.
Those were some of the achievements celebrated Thursday as city officials, a dozen kids who had paid jobs this summer as clean-up “ambassadors,” and Mayor Toni Harp marked the first year of her “Clean City” initiatives with a party and awards ceremony in the sun-lit atrium of City Hall.
Green received his certificate of recognition from LCI’s Frank D’Amore.
“It was the mayor’s passion to have a clean city before she was mayor,” said Department of Public Works Volunteer Coordinator Honda Smith.
“It’s also been our mission at Public Works,” Smith added.
Smith became one of a “clean city group,” organized by the city’s Chief Administrative Officer Michael Carter and composed of representatives from city agencies and other participating organizations like Urban Resources Initiative and the Town Green Special Services District. They met regularly to organize initiatives and fill in cleaning gaps among the various city services.
The results, on display on posters in the City Hall atrium for about a month, include the slogan and winners of a citywide poster contest, with a special nod to John S. Martinez School sixth-grader Jason Sanchez. His winning design is now appearing in brochures, a magnetized edition to fit on city vehicles, on school bulletin boards and in other venues.
If a poster contest and initiatives with getting school kids sounds, well, high-school-ish, it’s deliberately so, said Win Davis, who heads the Town Green Special Services District, one of the many partners in the citywide effort over the last year.
Smith with some of the anti-littering goodies that have gone into the schools.
“We haven’t had a national anti-littering campaign in 20 years, so there’s a whole generation that hasn’t been exposed to anti-littering [messages, on a national level, like ‘Smoky the Bear’ or the ‘Crying Indian’” he said.
Those campaigns also morphed over the decades into a focus on recycling, so that “the onus of a new anti-littering awareness has shifted to the states and to cities like New Haven,” Davis added.
Hence the school poster contests the anti-littering superhero comic books that Smith has been distributing, more than 1,000 copies, all over the city.
Smith concurred that “you have a generation that just didn’t care. The kids see their parents littering. It’s a learned behavior. The litterers are clearly younger people, and some baby boomers,” she said.
The experience of 16-year-old Wilbur Cross High School student Rahmel Green bore this out.
Green is one of 21 young people hired through Livable City Initiative and other city agencies as “ambassadors” to work for a month this summerleaning up the Hill, Dixwell, and Newhallville, where he lives on Pond Street.
Was he a guilty of littering before he got involved with the program?
“I’m from New York!” he replied. “It’s normal to throw it on the ground,” although that did not apply to his own block of Newhallville, Pond Street, where a few impressive local women lead the way in picking up trash.
“If I was on any other street with litter, I’d drop it. Now I put it in the trash.”
Green, in black shirt, and the other “ambassadors” await their certificates.
People offering the teens glasses of water or fruit and offered to lend them own rakes and other tools. That encouraged Green to stick with this program.
The future math teacher said his plans for next summer include “thinking of taking a supervisor job in this program.”
The job, Rahmel’s first, was also “a boost to thinking about being a math teacher, to see how people [when you do a good job] appreciate me” he added.
” clean city does really pay,” Economic Development Administrator Matt Nemerson said in his formal remark. “We get the compliments, but you do the work.”
Carter also announced that Sherwin-Williams paint stores will provide an anti-graffiti kitf or citizens. All you have to do is come to City Hall, apply, get qualified and take the voucher offered to one of the stores, Carter said.
Honda Smith’s next big clean-up volunteer effort is planned for Sept. 17. She has enlisted 66 Southern Connecticut State University students to do clean-ups that day across the city, including cutting away vegetation on the entryways to roads and medians.
Anyone interested in pitching in can reach Smith at 203 – 946-7700.
<blockquote>Compliments from potential developers about how neat New Haven looks.</blockquote>
Yeah, well they wouldn't think that if they had seen all the discarded mattresses and broken televisions in Fair Haven. Not to mention trash bags just tossed on the side of the road.