Community Pride Shines as Renovo Volunteers Clean Up Town Ahead of Flaming Foliage Festival
By Kevin Rauch
RENOVO – Once, maybe even twice a year, a community event or program takes place that captures the heart of which a town truly stands for. That proved to be the case Friday in Renovo as a town cleanup literally swept through the streets leaving remarkably noticeable cleaner curbs, sidewalks and properties all thanks to volunteers of all ages and coming from school-aged kids to retired couples and just about every type of person in between.
With a concentration on the parade route for the upcoming 76th Annual Flaming Foliage Festival the volunteers picked up loose curbs, spent hours on their hands and knees getting grass and debris out of the cracks in sidewalks, cleaned and decorated empty buildings, cut down overgrown shrubs and disposed of thousands of pounds of trash and garbage.
Thirty-two volunteers showed up at the Flaming Foliage lot at 8:00 AM and would spend the next 7 hours performing manual labor of all types.
The idea began several weeks ago when Bobbi and Kraig Barner as well as Maria Ransom and Heather Long noticed that the town wasn’t in the best of shape with Flaming Foliage drawing near. Proving small town community pride still exists; it quickly grew as all that they pitched the idea to quickly jumped on board.
The Renovo Borough, Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage, Renovo Water Department, Western Clinton County Municipal Authority, FFF Committee members, FFF hostesses and escorts as well as Bucktail High School and then residents from all over western Clinton County agreed to help and showed up on force. JJ Peters generously donated the dumpsters used for the cleanup, making the large-scale trash removal possible.
“There’s a lot of pride still left in the town and many want to see it shine for Flaming Foliage Weekend,” said Maria Ransom. “Bobbi really took the lead on this, every time I talked to her she had new ideas or contacted new people, she was fantastic through this whole process.”
“It was such a great effort by everyone and it was a terrific surprise to see so many people show up, retired couples that don’t live in town like Robert and Rita Cozzi and Gene and Angie Lavelle, we didn’t anticipate people like that coming but it just shows how many people truly care about Renovo,” said Barner.
Bucktail High School was proudly represented throughout the day and led to some unique circumstances.
The senior girl’s tennis players may have been hard at their cleaning efforts for hours, but would still find time to defeat the Jersey Shore tennis team later in the afternoon. Eva Sockman was one of those seniors and although today she was in sweats digging dirt out of sidewalk cracks, in two weeks she will be representing her school and town as Miss Bucktail on the back of a convertible, waving to all those that line the streets and sidewalks that she and her classmates helped to spruce up.
With all of the hard work lunch needed provided and that too was taken care of. DJ Perry was one of the Eastern Gas employees on hand and as a new part-business owner of Three Brothers Pizza provided half of the pizzas for the volunteers, Margaret Riggle donated $60 towards it and Bobbi and Kraig picked up the rest of the tab.
The day also served as a think tank of future ideas such as annual spring and fall cleanups and maybe even offering some type of program where families can sponsor streets to keep an eye on and maintain.
Unfortunately the state of just how much work needed done was noticed by the adults in particular. Some of those would love to see borough ordinances tightened up and enforced more vigorously. Still, on this day those concerns were shrugged off for the most part.
“Yeah, we definitely heard many people saying ‘you shouldn’t have to do this,’ but, if you love your town, it’s just what you do,” said Barner full of pride following the day’s efforts.
