The Communities in Bloom (CIB) results were finally released and while our overall score went up by one and a half per cent, Humboldt didn't perform as well as hoped.
Out of 1,000 possible points, the city scored 835. The community lost a few points compared to last year in the heritage conservation and landscape categories, but increased in all the other areas.
"We didn't win in our category, which is fine; it's not all about winning. It's about improving and we did improve by 1.5 per cent over the previous year," said Roger Nordick, a city councilor who represented the community at the national CIB conference in Charlottetown in September. "We only lost the winning five per cent, so that's how close we were for communities competing in that (population) category.
Over the last three years, Humboldt has been in that five bloom category and while there's a 20-point improvement capacity, the goal still hasn't been reached.
"We want to find ways to convince local government, businesses, institutions, and local citizens in the community to make just a little more effort and maybe that will push us over that 1.5 per cent," said Nordick. "We have to find creative ways to encourage people- and that's part of why we go to the conferences, to come up with creative ideas to convince property owners to take ownership and try to make this place a better place to live by improving their own properties, because we can't do it alone."
According to Nordick, one of the areas the city lost some points was with general tidiness. While most of the community is tidy in many ways, the entrances to the city are lacking. There's a farmyard just outside the city's south entrance that's an "absolute mess" and there are some untidy properties coming in from the west. The north entrance isn't too bad because there isn't much actually out there, but the east is probably one of the most damaging factors.
"Brockmans. That's a bit of a mess and we lost in the environmental factor because of that. They're dumping into the creek and that was seen by the judges. They're dumping concrete into an environmentally sensitive area," said Nordick. "The tidiness is the easiest to overcome, but we have to address a collaborative approach to improving the entrances to the community."
Nordick says the new LED sign going up by the west entrance should help a lot since that's the first thing judges look for when entering a community. They look for signage and how well it portrays the community.
Signage, however, is only one small part of what the judges look for when they arrive. Aside from heritage conservation, landscape, and tidiness, there's also environmental action, urban forestry, and floral displays. All of those categories encompass a multitude of things ranging in specificity. To deal with all of this, Nordick is hoping a newly formed regional committee will be able to tackle some of these challenges.
"We hope the committee is going to create a bond between the (municipal and provincial) governments," said Nordick. "Once the CIB committee sorts out what direction they want to go, they need to relay that to the local government and the city can discuss it and enter into talks with the RM of Humboldt. Then that'll come down to enforcement and maybe changing bylaws."
As it stands, the city doesn't have any jurisdiction in certain areas where the RM does, so working together would give them more clout. Moreover, if the city can engage students in the schools, they'd have more numbers to help out around the community.
"I think education has to play a big part of it, but that's one of the things we have to discuss as a committee," said Nordick. "How are we going to get to the next level? We're going to be flailing around in the five-bloom category forever if we don't make some effort to correct some of our old habits."
Despite the areas that Nordick is focusing on for improvement, the city had an overall score of 83.5 per cent, which is still an improvement from last year's score of 82.
