Pocatello gearing up for annual spring cleanup project and the public is invited to help
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POCATELLO – The city of Pocatello wants the public’s help with its annual spring cleaning project.
It’s happening Saturday, may 3, and is sponsored by the Pocatello/Chubbuck Chamber of Commerce Beautification Council.
“Be ready to have a satisfying, fulfilling time. The people that show up — they’re always pretty happy, and there’s lots of camaraderie there,” said Mark Dahlquist, the executive director of Neighborworks Pocatello, who also sits on the Community Beautification Council.
Neighborworks Pocatello is one of a variety of organizations that help support the event. It provides gloves to volunteers. The city of Pocatello’s sanitation department provides free trash bags and Portneuf Health Trust provides free Health City USA T-shirts to volunteers.
Dahlquist, who said that the event has been running for over three decades, estimates that the event gets around 250 volunteers per year. Most of those volunteers sign up the day of the event.
Dahlquist explains how the spring cleanup positively affects the economic development of Pocatello.
“You can try and recruit companies and do different things and waive fees and all that, but if we have a good, clean looking community where it just looks like people care and they get involved that, when people are looking to establish a new business or expand, they want to go into a nice, clean community that feels good about itself,” Dahlquist said.
Dahlquist also believes that the people who volunteer find it to be personally fulfilling.
“It’s real satisfying when I’m part of a group, and they drive down the road when it’s all over with, and it’s clean and they’ve got the tied up garbage bags there. It’s just really fulfilling,” Dahlquist said.
The spring cleanup will kick off at 8:30 a.m. with a free pancake and sausage breakfast from the Trailblazers at Caldwell Park. While people who arrive on Saturday morning will be assigned areas of the city to clean, people and groups can sign up for specific areas beforehand.
The community-wide effort to clean up the city typically lasts until 10 a.m., at which point the sanitation department picks up the bags and takes them to the Bannock County Landfill.
To sign up or learn more, call Carin Tatom at the Pocatello-Chubbuck Chamber of Commerce at (208) 233-1525.