Community Project

People attending Festival Days events this weekend - and from now on - might notice the results of the second project underway of a group working to revitalize downtown Havre: colorful local art adorning control boxes by the city's traffic lights.

"It's awesome," said Havre native Jillian Allen, who both submitted art used in the project and helped prepare the files to go on vinyl wraps around the traffic control boxes. "It's going to be nice to have some color in Havre.

"I"m pretty pumped for it," Allen added.

The project is the second of several underway by the Downtown Revitalization Group, with cleaning and sealing the "Welcome to Havre" signs on U.S. Highway 2 on the east and west sides of town completed last year.

A project much further down the road is finding a way to create an urban renewal program to make major revitalization to downtown properties.

The traffic box project, several years in the making, is just getting started. Wednesday, Shawn Holden of Holden's Hot Wheels and Holden's Beaver Creek Designs put up one wrap, with a BNSF Railway theme, at the intersection First Street and Fifth Avenue near the railroad tracks, while Brenda Cox of Floren's Hill County Printing put one up at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Sixth Street - on the route to Blue Pony Stadium - with a Blue Pony theme.

Havre Area Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Debbie Vandeberg said the revitalization group wanted to stay completely local, so Holden's design company and Floren's made all of the vinyl wraps, which will cover the control boxes at all nine traffic lights in and near Havre once it is complete.

She said the project actually started before the revitalization group was formed two years ago, when she brought back the idea after seeing it in Spokane.

Vandeberg said several Montana cities have done the same thing, but the Havre project is unique - it uses all local art with local themes. The group put out a call for local artwork, and people could vote on their favorites during the Kiwanis Pancake Breakfast during last year's Festival Days.

The winning pieces were then digitized by local photographer Steve Helmbrecht - "That was a lot of work in itself," Allen said - and then Allen used Photoshop to build images with single or combined pieces of art to fit the required size for the boxes.

All of the work had to meet the requirements of the Montana Department of Transportation, which owns and oversees the boxes.

Vandeberg said it has been a long, involved process to get to this stage.

When she first brought the idea back, finding funds to pay for the project was a setback. After the revitalization group was formed and the wraps were discussed, representatives of Wells Fargo Bank in Great Falls, who attended the meetings, offered the opportunity to apply for a grant from the bank, Vandeberg said. That resulted in $1,500 in funding for the project.

Later, when the costs were found to be higher than expected, the Sleeter Fund donated another $1,500, she said, and the balance came from local supporters.

"It has been a community project and it continues to be a community project," Vandeberg said.

The group had the Havre city government make a request to MDT to put the wraps on the boxes.

Volunteers then cleaned the traffic boxes.

One of the goals of the wraps - as well as to add some color to the town and attract people to walk and shop in downtown Havre - was to eliminate the posting of signs on the traffic boxes - which also is illegal under both city and state law, she said.

"That was one of a long list of things we felt would be cool and give color and, at same time, get rid of the ugly posting of bills on those," she said.

Another revitalization project also is underway - the addition of colorful bicycle racks on sidewalks in downtown Havre.

Jim Bennett, who is one of the people working on that project, said the first rack is nearly done. Pacific Steel and Recycling is helping make metal signs - Bennet said the artwork will be cut out of the metal sheet - that will be put above the bicycle rack itself.

Bennett said four racks are planned, but the group is waiting until the first is completed to show to owners of potential locations to start picking spots for them. The racks will be mounted directly onto sidewalks, he said, which already has been approved by Havre City Council's Streets and Sidewalks Committee.

"They've graciously allowed us to do this," Bennett said.

Havre City Council President Andrew Brekke, a member of the revitalization group, said the teamwork and projects exemplify how the working group functions.

"We're a big town, but we have a little town atmosphere," Brekke said. "This is a great way for the city and Chamber and businesses to work together."

And other projects are in the works. Bennet, Allen and Vandeberg all talked about plans to put murals on the walls of downtown buildings, for one.

Brekke said another longer-term project also is being considered - creation of an urban renewal district.

"It's quite a project," Brekke said.

The process is all lined out in state law, he said. The city would first need to set the area the district would refer to - which could be city-wide but generally is a smaller area - then define what would be looked at in the district. Part of it could deal with run-down, vacant buildings, for example.

Once blight is defined and the boundaries are set, the district is created, and can use a variety of funding mechanisms to improve the district, Brekke said.

A common tool is a tax increment finance district, in which the tax levels for local governments are frozen and any additional taxes coming from increases in the value of properties in the district goes into funding for the district.

Such a district could help with major improvements to the downtown area, along with the other projects of the revitalization group, Brekke said.

"Everybody knows what the problem is we just have to figure out what to do," he said.