Snowplows beautified by school art Tony Fietzer Street Superintendent City of Green Bay, Wisconsin Member, APWA Emerging Leaders Academy Class V n a warm day in May 2011, I was sitting in my office thinking snow! I guess that comes with living in Green Bay, WI (aka: the Frozen Tundra). Although at this time of year in Wisconsin we generally have relatively comfortable weather, snowplowing still represents so much of what we do for the city in the public’s eye. Being that we are judged often by residents based on how well we plow snow we sought out a way to incorporate a positive influence with our snowplows. I contacted various Green Bay public schools asking for them and their students to join our department in painting murals on our snowplows. As I began to speak with principals and art teachers, I could tell immediately that they couldn’t wait to join in on our project. The City of Green Bay has 36 public schools in the school district. Knowing that we couldn’t involve every school this year, I selected 10 schools to be involved in this project. Of the 10 schools, five were on the east side of town and five on the west side of town. In speaking with the principals and art teachers from the selected schools, they were asked to paint a mural on the snowplow that they felt either represented their school or city, or a mural that they felt would be fun to portray. The school staff welcomed this with open arms and in September 2011 our staff dropped the plows off at the schools for painting. The plows that were picked to be painted were the same plows that traditionally are assigned to plow the neighborhood that the school
22 APWA Reporter
January 2012
