Volunteers sought for U.S. 30 project

DAVE MOSIER/independent editor

Noting that beautification projects have a positive effect on economic development, Van Wert County Business Outreach Coordinator Sarah Smith said she’s looking for a few good, um, gardeners, to help with one such project along U.S. 30.

Smith said she’s hoping to interest local landscaping companies and gardening groups in a project to beautify the land around the U.S. 30/U.S. 224 interchange in the county.

“The idea is to let people traveling U.S. 30 know we are here and make the county a welcoming and inviting stop they’d like to make,” Smith said of the project, the first of several she’d like to do in the county.

The county’s economic development person said she was inspired by a decade-old public-private partnership in the city of Troy that beautified an interchange along Interstate 75. That project includes 18.42 acres — the size of 13 football fields — 250 trees and a large number of flowers, including 10,000 tulips purchased a few years ago using public donations that are still blooming.

Ted Mercer of the Mercer Group, a Troy-based company that provides turf maintenance for athletic fields, founded what is known as Operation Cloverleaf on June 3, 2003, along with seven other Troy area landscaping and tree-trimming businesses.

Mercer explained that the Ohio Department of Transportation provided an elaborate (for the time) landscaping design when it redid an I-75 interchange in Troy a decade ago, but he and other Troy residents weren’t happy with the job ODOT did in maintaining the landscaping on the interchange. “They mowed it maybe once a month,” Mercer noted.

To keep the interchange looking nice, Mercer talked to some of his colleagues about forming a group to maintain the area.

“I contacted probably 12 companies and got eight ‘yeses’ and that’s how it started,” Mercer said. The private companies mow, fertilize, provide weed control, tree spraying, mulching and pruning, and vegetation control under the overpass.

The City of Troy buys fertilizer, weed control chemicals and mulch for the project.

“It’s kind of unique,” Mercer said of the program, adding that ODOT officials said the program was the longest running such volunteer effort in the state.

It’s the kind of project Smith is hoping to do here in Van Wert County, using public funding from ODOT’s Gateway Landscaping Program to provide plants and other materials and area landscaping companies and designers — and maybe some garden clubs — to provide the labor for the project.

Once interested parties are identified, Smith said she hopes to select a company or companies to design, maintain — and leave their legacy on — each of the interchange’s four sections. Those chosen would be publicly recognized for their efforts, with efforts underway with ODOT to have names of those involved included in signage at the interchange.

“The answer may come with simply striping the grass and replacing dead vegetation, or it can go as far as local creativity and talent can take us,” Smith said.

Mercer noted that the Troy project has been rewarding, but also said it takes effort and commitment from those who get involved. “It (the I-75 interchange) takes 18½ hours to mow each week and we donate close to $52,000 in services and labor each year to the project,” he said.

Smith said that local landscaping companies or gardening organizations interested in accepting the challenge and partnering with the county on the project can contact her at the commissioners’ office, 419.238.6159 or by email at sksmithx5@hotmail.com before August 25.