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Looking For Volunteers

'Adopt A Median' Street dividers in Hartford have gone to seed, need cleanup

Hartford Courant

August 23, 2010

Hartford city councilman Luis Cotto is offended at the sight of unkempt street medians — tall weeds, clutter — and proposes a volunteer adopt-a-median program to help solve the problem.

His proposal was introduced before the council recently and we hope it's approved with dispatch.

Medians, as he notes, "are very low priority. We don't have the resources to get to all the city's green spaces. We don't have enough people."

Mr. Cotto's idea is to allow volunteers, individually or as a group, to select a median and promise to keep it clean and manicured.

The volunteers could get credit on signs bearing their names for a fee. The program would be administered by the city's public works department.

Adopt-A-Median would fit nicely with the volunteer effort being promoted by Mayor Pedro Segarra to clean up Hartford parks.

Other cities — Indianapolis, Dallas, Newark, Boulder, Colo. — have established median programs. States have volunteers cleaning up sections of highway right-of-way. Local volunteers in Connecticut towns tend pots and barrels of flowers to spruce up medians and traffic islands.

Why not an Adopt-A-Median program in Hartford? Go to it, Mr. Cotto.