Uh we'll call this meeting of the beautification commission to order at 5 p.m.

on April 20th.

Um in the room, we have Commissioners Weaver, Green Liner, and Nielsen.

Um we don't have any B online and uh we expect another person, but we will interrupt the meeting when she arrives and welcome her back.

I feel like the band is back together.

Um we have as our third item approval of minutes.

Um if there are no objections or any corrections, uh is there any discussion on those straightforward?

So the minutes of January 15th and March 16th, 2026 stand approved by consensus.

Um is there any public business from the floor?

Uh good afternoon, uh Chair Nielsen and members of the commission.

I'm Elise Sarmberg, and I'm putting on a different hat um as a member of uh the Gold Rush Committee.

Um I serve on the board for Gold Rush, and one of the items that has been discussed recently has been um the Golden Rock Awards.

Um right now there isn't really an organization or a group of people or a group of people who have uh taken that on in recent years and um at a recent gold rush meeting beautification commission came up as possibly a group that might be interested in doing judging for that and helping with that.

Um so I don't know if that's something the commission's interested in at all, but I just wanted to bring it up and see what your thoughts were.

Thank you.

I think that's a great offer.

Um is there any interest among our present members?

I feel like we can do that.

Yeah, how many great idea for us to be a part of?

Would it be one to five or did you have an uh an idea of what the scope is that you'd have us take on?

Um I think it will depend on how many entries there are, but um Katie Carr helped coordinate it last year, and um and and your guys' role would be to be judging.

So if you were nominated, of course you couldn't participate in judging, but um just it would it would probably entail um you guys either as pairs or on your own going around to the nominees and just making determinations for each of the prices.

Do you have a current um tablet to work on for you know for the advertising and then for the um and all the applications are done online, correct?

Yeah, yeah, and so we you you guys wouldn't be responsible for advertising or that part of it, it would just be for the the actual judging of the one the entries.

Okay, yeah.

I've done that in the past, and it's really fun to go into people's yards and snip around, see what they're doing and learning a lot of things about gardening and all these.

All right.

Any other questions for Elise?

Thanks, Elise.

Thank you for being interested.

Under new business, we have um a discussion item um that has to do our decorative lights on Eden Tribe.

And this was brought forward as a discussion item at the request of Commissioner Weaver, and um Elise has asked Dan for it as the director of uh buildings maintenance to attend um to take questions and um just just discuss the scope and the um some of the trials and tribulations from his end and maybe come together with a common vision for some kind of direction.

Sam, thank you for taking the time to come.

So to jump off, would you um would you kind of give an overview of of what it looks like from your side of taking care of those lights and what you'd like to see happen, if anything?

We do a lot with the lights.

Uh they've they serve a lot of a purpose right now.

Um at this time of year we put banners up, but we started this during COVID for the graduating seniors.

Uh we take we put banners up during the summertime, they get pretty well destroyed during the wind, and we take those down.

I believe uh Martha's uh has ordered new banners for this year, but we put the senior banners up, we take those down during the winter time.

We put up snowflakes with lights, and then we wrap the poles with candy cane lights that we've generally for the last several years have bought through Amazon.

Uh those produce a nice effect, and we're supposed to have the ability to change the colors of the lights.

The problem is though they say they're outdoor lights, they're not really outdoor lights for Valdez.

Uh so we end up replacing them almost every year.

Um, those kind of things are not a real big problem for us because the the crew doesn't mind doing those things.

The other problems we have is maintaining the poles because they seem to be a car magnet, and we've had a number of them knocked over and destroyed.

In fact, we've deleted a couple of poles that got hit more than once, but uh they're costly to repair because of the fact that these are one of a kind.

Uh the the poles are made by a company and that they're kind of a stock item, but to get the color and everything, they have to be manufactured every time we ask for parts.

Last year we went out, we'd had so many damage that basically they've got an arm that supports the lights, and we were running out of parts, and so we looked at buying a bunch of parts, and we spent $20,000 to get four new arms to support the light fixtures.

One of the things that has been talked about is the light fixtures themselves are just an LED light fixtures, and LED light fixtures can be made to have any different color or combination of colors.

And so we'd started trying to ask several years ago about the ability to take the fixture itself that's in what we call a China cap and uh have those light colors changed.

The the problem was that the people we were dealing with weren't really forthcoming with any kind of answers.

Uh last summer I got frustrated because when I got ready to get the the arms, uh Alaska Architectural Lighting was the architect on the original project.

We kept going back to them and didn't get a lot of feedback or information from them.

So I finally took and found um the parts, a parts list, and I put it out to bid to electric companies, and Brown's Electric came in very happily to be able to supply those parts and pieces from the factory.

And so now we have a supplier, we can go back to them and get the different parts and pieces.

And uh last uh last year, Diane Clary from Brown's Electric was looking to see the availability of getting something in those lights that would change color, and that would alleviate the need for wrapping those lights of the candy canes in the same time, they will last a lot longer.

So that's kind of the in the nutshell where we are with those lights.

They're a good feature, but basically right now they're they're they're kind of maintenance heavy.

So we're trying to find something that's gonna portray the the kind of an atmosphere that we want without having some of the repetitive things that we do every year.

So any questions?