A shiny new utility vehicle to help with garbage collection, plant watering, and snow removal landed on the front lawn of Grand Avenue Village Association Wednesday morning in Fair Haven.
The city’s newest special services district thinks their Arctic Cat could beat out the venerable Town Green Special Services Gator in a clean up match any day.
The sturdy and spiffy, bright green two-seater, an estimated value of $10,000, is the gift to GAVA of the Fitch family, the community-minded owners of New Haven Partitions (NHP) and the Quinnipiac River Marina on Front Street.
Lisa Fitch (pictured with NHP’s shop manager Tim McNulty) said the gift was in acknowledgment of “how GAVA is helping to bring Grand Avenue businesses and Fair Haven to another level.”
The Cat, said GAVA’s executive director, Gabriela Campos, will enable GAVA to perform its beautification, sanitation, and security services more economically and independently.
GAVA, which recently conducted a successful election among local merchants, to form the city’s newest special services district, currently contracts with the Town Green Special Services District (owner of a that other motorized creature, the Gator) to clean and maintain properties and appearances along the Grand Avenue corridor.
“This vehicle,” said GAVA board member and owner of the People’s Laundromat Angelo Reyes, “will enable us to do all those things on our own, and more efficiently.”
Along with Carlos Eyzaguirre of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which provides GAVA with technical assistance, Reyes admired the dumpster on the back and the attachments for a plow that can be mounted on the front of the Cat.
Heretofore, Reyes said that every winter he plowed the eastern portion of the GAVA corridor’s sidewalks, and Rose Cimino (pictured with Gabriela Campos in the driver’s seat), the owner of Apicella’s Bakery took responsibility for store owners’ plowing and clearing their sidewalks west of Blatchley Avenue.
Now the Cat will be able to do it all.
By law, Campos said, GAVA, as a new SSD, must send out its own Request for Proposal, for its future maintenance contract, which, with the Cat, it will be able to manage more carefully and economically.
The Cat is expected, for example, to deal efficiently with the bags from the public garbage cans, which Campos, Eyzaguirre, and GAVA board member Art Friend demonstrated. Every night the bags come out of the cans, and early the next morning are picked up by GAVA.
Rose Cimino was particularly pleased with the increased capacity the Cat offers for extending cleaning and maintenance services to the sides trees up and down the Grand Avenue spine.
GAVA’s different board members and supporters have somewhat different visions of a Fair Haven five years from now. Lisa Fitch, for example, says she more and more wants Fair Haven to reflect its maritime past with increased use of the water front. Angelo Reyes once said to a reporter that he wants Grand Avenue to be a kind of Latino Wooster Square, and, more than that. “I want to see, “he said, “kids from Yale jogging down Grand in safety and pleasure all the way from downtown to the river.”
Whatever the varying visions, the Cat, they all agreed, would, in part, be taking them there.
On April 21st, at 9:00 a.m. GAVA meets with the 70 businesses and 30 non profits in its circle to adopt by-laws, including determining self-assessments, as it formalizes its new status as a special services district.
Something really good is happening in Fair Haven and I love it. Like much of the city it has some of the most elegant historic housing stock in the country and it will be a really great thing for it all to be retored.