Spring is here. Summer is coming. It's time to plant flowers, keep those lawns trim, litter less (especially Caroline Street cigarette flingers) and generally make the Spa City look pretty. Saratoga Springs has entered itself in a beauty contest.
The 6-year-old America in Bloom contest matches cities and towns with others of like population nationwide for friendly competition in eight categories.
Saratoga Springs is up against Ithaca; Norwich, Conn.; Kirkwood, Mo.; and Beloit, Wis.
"Basically this gives us an opportunity to toot our horn about what a beautiful small town we are," said Stephanie Voigt, a clerk for the Department of Public Works, who helps Commissioner Tom McTygue with special projects like Saratoga Springs in Bloom.
"This is going to be a fun project for a lot of people to get involved with," McTygue said.
The cities will be judged on community involvement, environmental effort, floral displays, heritage, landscaped areas, tidiness effort, turf and ground cover, and urban forestry.
A committee was set up, including McTygue, city historian Mary Ann Fitzgerald and Ned
Chapman of Sunnyside Gardens, who won the bid to supply the city's flowers for 2007 and who suggested entering the contest. They discussed plans Thursday over lunch at the Gideon Putnam Hotel, whose director of sales, Pam Lollias, also serves on the committee. Chapman heard about the contest through a greenhouse and garden center trade group, the New York State Flower Growers' Association.
A brochure detailing Saratoga Springs In Bloom will be available at the farmer's market reopening for the season at High Rock Avenue next week.
Tips for the citizenry include volunteering with cleanup efforts, weeding, filling planters with flowers, doing outside home improvement projects and painting, picking up after your dog, biking to work, and hiding garbage cans behind a screen.
Voigt will document the contest in a book. Fitzgerald and McTygue said it would preserve the Saratoga Springs of now as the city's archives preserve its rich past.
"Saratoga Springs is taking a snapshot of 2007," said Fitzgerald.
McTygue thought it was a good time for the contest, noting that beautification efforts had increased over the past 15 years.
The two judges are coming to town July 9 and 10 and will be staying at the Inn of Saratoga free of charge.
Fitzgerald hoped the community will pitch in like the way they did before the Roosevelt Baths opened in 1935.
"The community benefits so much when everyone pulls together for one specific thing," she said.
The committee joked that Ithaca would be a tough rival with the support of Cornell University and its laboratories. Cornell is in Ithaca.
Sunnyside's Chapman promises that Saratoga Springs will have a special flower, a worldwide exclusive impatient debuting this summer. Another committee member, Mary Jane Pelzer, will design a stamp in celebration of the impatient.
Reach Ted Reinert at treinert@saratogian.com or
583-8729, ext. 221.
©The Saratogian 2007
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