Quinnipiac East Weighs Oyster Murals Vs. Traffic Calming

Enhance the municipal canoe launch at Clifton Street. Fund a school-based anti-bullying program that culminates in a musical production. Beautify storm drains near local schools with images of fish. Paint a mural of an oyster near the Q River. Deploy pavement marking and bright textured paint to narrow the avenue and slow the traffic.

Those are among the proposals in the running with the Quinnipiac East Community Management Team meeting (QECMT) for how to use an annual $20,000 grant from the Livable City Initiative (LCI) anti-blight agency. Tme to spend the money, or return it, is running short.

The money is this year’s double-sized Neighborhood Public Improvement Program (NPIP) grant, administered through LCI to each of the city’s 12 community management teams.

Just as each team is different in composition, experience, and aims, each decides how to go about choosing.

The subject came up Tuesday night in the cafeteria of the Bishop Woods School cafeteria at the regular QECMT meeting, where a half dozen members of the Young Knights Brotherhood, an offshoot of Ray Wallace’s Guns Down/Books Up mentoring program, took the floor.

They were the living embodiment of the proposal they sought to fund: $1,900 for a program to help kids’ social development through the arts, culminating in a musical production.

Elizer Diaz and T.J. Yuio, both said they got a lot out of participating in the program. Elizer said he works with younger kids at his school, Bishop Woods, ​“showing them the path to prevent bullying.”

T.J. Yuio, also a Bishop Woods student, thought for a long time when asked what his best take-away is from the program. Finally he said, ​“I can be myself.”

Other proposals did not involve live presentations but printed documents, many with color pictures and careful budgeting. One proposal called for turning a non-buildable small lot at the corner of Hemingway and Eastern streets into a butterfly garden. ​“Let us turn small greens or unbuildable spaces into local gardens that attract pollinators,” the proposal states.

In addition to building the garden(s) and putting up plaques on the sites, the proposal calls for engaging local artists along with a number of classes of kids at area schools in contributing designs, writing essays and drawing images of the monarchs and other butterflies that will be showing up. Estimated price tag; $5,000.

Another proposal would create an historically relevant mural including images of the Q river, oysters, oystermen, and their vessels on an unused wall near the Grand Avenue Bridge at 12 East Grand Ave. The $8,000 pricetag would cover not only the artists’ fees and materials, but costs for fixing parts of the wall, currently with big holes from former air conditioning unit, and cutting back — and maintaining — the adjacent vegetation.

Joann Moran runs the Lots of Fish program in doing environmental art work, like storm drains decorated with fish, near schools. She proposed advancing that work with decorative fish designs at three storm drain locations distributed throughout the three wards of the QECMT district.

The idea is to use art to connect local kids to the presence and key importance of water all around us in New Haven, a reality taken all too much for granted.

Her $5,000 ​“Lots of Fish” project would include $3,350 for the artist and supplies and $1,200 for coordinating and paying for the permitting from the city. Among the possible storm drain locations, Moran included in her proposal both public schools such as Bishop Woods and private ones like The Friends Center for Children, high on the heights in the Fair Haven.

There were also smaller (financially) proposals for repairing and enhancing the Clifton Street boat launch, putting up historical markers at the Grand Avenue Bridge and other key sites, and aa range of traffic-calming plans to slow down cars on Quinnipiac Avenue.

Patricia Kane reminded fellow team members that all the monies must be spent by June 30, and therefore work begun as soon as possible. So it was decided to dedicate a separate meeting, on Jan. 16, to the issue.

Attendees decided that at that time, all the proposals will be debated and voting take place on which to fund.

The meeting place is to be the Friends Center for Children Friends Meeting House at 225 E. Grand Ave. in Fair Haven Heights. That school, or another single respected group in the neighborhood, would also be voted on to be the single fiduciary, the repository for the grant funds, with dispositions for the various chosen projects.