When the smallest city in the littlest state is emerging from a bankruptcy declared in 2011, the budget for a project such as trash cans for the public park is not just small – it’s nonexistent.
The lack of municipal funding didn’t stop 24-year-old Central Falls Director of Planning and Economic Development Stephen Larrick from finding another way to buy the trash cans – and not just any trash cans.
Larrick came up with a plan to get funding for artistic, functional and culturally relevant trash and recycling cans for the city’s Jenks Park through a somewhat uncommon route for municipal projects – crowd funding.
The Clean Up CF: New Bins in Jenks Park fundraising project is live online at citizinvestor.com, the crowd funding and civic-engagement platform for government projects.
“I’ve used crowd funding before on Kickstarter to help support a friend’s film and few other projects,” said Larrick, who graduated from Brown University in 2011 with a focus on urban studies.
About a year ago, Larrick began to watch a startup called Citizinvestor, a sort of municipal version of Kickstarter, where towns and cities could post projects online in hopes of attracting money from interested investors beyond municipal borders.
Considering Central Falls’ size of one-square-mile, it didn’t take much stretching to reach out across city lines to seek funding for new trash cans.
Then, in one of those small-world, Rhode Island connections, Larrick found Central Falls linked, by coincidence, with an Ocean State native in Tampa, Fla., Citizinvestor co-founder Tony DeSisto.
“I didn’t know him and had never even heard his name before,” said Larrick, who is from Massachusetts. “I had no idea he was from Rhode Island.”
Larrick’s interest in posting the Jenks Park trash-can project on Citizinvestor found its way to DeSisto.
“Steve happened to email us to say he was interested in posting a project,” said DeSisto, a Portsmouth native. “It was during the time I was up in Rhode Island in the summer visiting family. It was fortuitous. I was able to go to Central Falls and meet with some of the department heads. It’s not something we usually do. I’d done that only a couple of times on projects in Florida. “
The personal meeting just made the Central Falls project stand out a little bit, said DeSisto.
The story of Central Falls’ climb back to financial stability, while building its cultural and community strength and identity, will be told artistically through public-sculpture trash cans. The receptacles will be the product of the artistic and metalworking skills of designers at the Steel Yard, a catalyst for the arts and industrial projects located in Providence. The Steel Yard has created an extensive range of public art, including many trash and recycling cans, bike racks and benches in municipalities, including Bristol, Warren and Providence, designed with input from the community.
The Steel Yard’s proposal for Central Falls totals $9,300 for 10 combined bins, five for trash and five for recycling, anchored in concrete. That would be a major improvement.
“The park is often littered with garbage and debris due to the fact that the only available trash cans are low-quality, donated plastic bins that tip over easily, spilling trash everywhere,” according to the city’s posting on Citizinvestor. “The scattered garbage and debris is an eyesore and an environmental hazard for the countless children, families and residents who use the park on a daily basis.”
The proposed new cans would add recycling, which is not done now in the park.
Materials and designs would reflect the history or culture of the community, the way the Steel Yard trash-can project in Bristol uses metalworking reflective of gates in the town, along with oak barrels that suggest its maritime heritage.
“Jenks Park is already a unique and dynamic space,” said Howie Sneider, public-projects director for the Steel Yard. “When we do our projects, we talk to community members about their contemporary story, about what they want to represent in modernizing the park.
“Along with input from the community, we have artists and fabricators who will offer suggestions on making the park more beautiful and functional with their designs,” said Sneider. In addition to the Steel Yard’s $9,300 cost for the project, the Citizinvestor fee is 5 percent of the project. Another 3 percent is added for the credit company that handles the online payments, bringing the project total to $10,044, which is the goal posted for crowd funding.
“The crowd funding serves a special function, a recognition that doing a project is not ordering trash cans from a catalog,” said Sneider. “It makes it a very public process. The people will be the decision-makers and influence the look and feel of their community. The crowd funding also gives them a responsibility to be proactive and get people to support the project.”
So far, crowd funding is getting a good response from community leaders, said Larrick.
“I think the people at city hall were really excited about the project,” said Larrick, who was the first staff person hired after the bankruptcy.
With the city working under a five-year plan of debt adjustment, there’s not much wiggle room from what’s been approved, he said. That can cause some restriction in envisioning municipal improvements.
“I tell people interested in investing in Central Falls that we have a measure of certainty with the five-year debt-adjustment plan and we’re lean,” said Larrick. “But we don’t often think about what we could do with $10,000. I think this crowd-funding project is empowering for some city officials.”
Citizinvestor has posted 18 projects; 10 of those in the past three months, said DeSisto. Of the 18 total, seven are ongoing, 11 projects have reached their deadline, three have been unsuccessful in raising the money and eight have been successfully funded.
The Central Falls 60-day crowd-funding project is scheduled to wrap up Nov. 22. None of the financial pledges are processed unless the goal is met. More than two weeks into the project, $1,125 had been pledged by 22 investors.
“I’m very into e-government and government 2.0 ideas because in a lot of cases it allows you to be more efficient with your resources,” said Larrick. “I think it’s novel that a city that was bankrupt is using this very modern Web 2.0 plan and getting some donors to fund a project they might not have been able to fund.” •
