EDITOR:

This letter is in response to Ms. Karen Moore’s snarky response at the last council meeting, “It’s easier to get a pot store in Escanaba than a garden.”

Well, Ms. Moore those pot stores had a process to follow regarding guidelines. They had to submit the legal paperwork with documentation…not just, “I have an idea!”

You started out with an idea for “history garden” with not even a drawing or how you were going to fund or maintain this “history garden.” You still haven’t applied for grant money for this new idea for the “history garden” or explained what type of history artifacts you want donated? She said, she would like people to donate artifacts…and we could drop them off? Drop them off at her house? Maybe an old ringer wash machine or something we just don’t want to take to landfill?

My suggestion to Ms. Moore is to drive down our city streets. Our city streets are dilapidated and in need of repairs. Maybe as a home owner we should all go out and fill in the pot hole in front of our house, like she wants businesses to go out and weed around the big concrete pots and hydrangeas. Did she even talk with these business owners before the huge pots and hydrangea trees were placed. That it would be their responsibility to maintain her project?

It’s a wonderful idea with hanging baskets, huge filled flower pots and the hydrangea trees but they all take maintenance and that includes watering and weeding. It takes a seasonal city employee eight hours to water the hanging baskets, concrete pots and hydrangea trees. This seasonal employee could be filing in pot holes to at least keep our dilapidated streets drivable.

I commend, Ms. Moore, on her design of the garden in the roundabout in north Escanaba. But again, a city employee has to take a lawn mower and mow the little amount of grass in the roundabout. Why not design the center of the roundabout with shrubs and plants with no grass? Ms. Moore claims this “history garden” is going to be shrubs, trees, plants and artifacts. She explained the trees and shrubs that she plans to plant will be species that don’t have deep roots and take less water, less weeding and less maintenance. Shallow root species because of the water pipes in the area of this “history garden.”

Before Ms. Moore comes up with another project, I hope she and her (Enhance Escanaba) board and 50 volunteers would continue to maintain what she has going now in our city.

Ann Fix

Escanaba