Hill County Community Clean Up set for Earth Day

The Hill County Community Clean Up, previously called Havre Pride, is coming up Saturday, Earth Day, from 10 a.m. to noon.

The Havre Area Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Hill County Community Foundation is holding the event, which typically will be held around Earth Day, which encourages local residents to get out and spend the morning cleaning up the community after a long winter inside.

"Winter leaves a lot of debris and garbage lying around town," Chamber Director Jessica Fagerbakke said.

Local businesses and organizations tend to clean up around their own areas that day, Fagerbakke said, but if any people or organization is interested in helping outside their own areas, the Chamber has put together a map of problem areas in, and just outside of, Havre and people can come to them to get assigned an area that needs help.

A press release from the Chamber said they have identified 26 areas in need of help.

Despite the length of the winter and the flooding that has immediately followed the melting of so much snow last week, she said, it doesn't seem like there is substantially more trash and debris this year than last year.

Fagerbakke said the Hill County Community Foundation scopes out the area they think needs the most help and focuses on that, so it looks like they'll have the most in-need area taken care of regardless of turnout, but she hopes to see as many people as possible outside cleaning up on Saturday morning.

She said it's difficult to gauge turnout to this particular event, since so many people independently clean up that morning without any assistance or direction from the Chamber, so she's not sure what things will look like this time around.

She said the Chamber will be set up in Town Square with a sign-up sheet and direction for people looking to be assigned an area and they will provide people with trash bags.

Dumpsters will be available at the Highland Park Zip Trip - 911 11th St. W. - and the corner of First Street and Fifth Avenue downtown, the release said, and Pacific Steel and Recycling will have a dumpster in front of the business at 1805 U.S. Highway 2 East for all steel products.

The release warned people not to pick up drugs, needles, or other dangerous materials and instead to report such findings to the appropriate authority to handle.

At noon, Faggerbakke said, they are encouraging everyone who participates to come to Town Square and enjoy some food and drinks and some drawings for Chamber gift certificates.

Fagerbakke said people in Havre and the surrounding areas take a lot of pride in their community and she hopes events like this will show off that pride.

Anyone with questions about the event is encouraged to contact the Chamber at 406-265-4383.