Cascade, ID

Saturday, May 3 was a busy day for the Cascade Horizons Groups. Lifestyles & Education put on an open house at the fire department, promoting the upcoming merge of the city and rural fire departments, which is on the ballot for the primary election. They had games for the kids, free hot dogs, and conveyed a lot of info to locals about the merger. Hopefully it will pass. Curb Appeal was busy with lots of volunteers at the same time, cleaning up the dirt in the tree planters along Main Street and making room to place landscape mat and fill the planters with gravel. Over half the trees were done, in a very long & exhausing day. The crew will be back on May 17 to finish the job.
Main street looks much cleaner with this upgrade, and the Garden Club is pleased to not have to worry about the trees. The Garden Club will be planting flowers in wine barrels at the main intersections in town, to give Cascade some summer color.

Horizons came from U of I to Cascade, and now Cascade has gone to U of I for help. The Landscape Architecture Department at U of I, with guidance from our Steering Committee, and input from Friends of the Cascade Whitewater Park, is proceeding with a design for an expanded (95 new acres) park that integrates with the existing Armstrong Park and Fischer Pond Park and the proposed Cascade Whitewater Park. Exciting stuff. The Curb Appeal Group has worked with the Garden Club on the Main Street improvements, and the Airport on landscaping now underway. Our Lifestyles & Education has worked with the Fire Dept on their merger election and the Library on construction of their annex. Lots of people are talking and e-mailing each other in Cascade, and things are getting done. Many thanks to Horizons.

Going to the City Council in May, is a request to clean up and fix up the signage related to the recreation opportunities in Cascade. Curb Appeal is volunteering to do the work, asking the City to only pay for the new signage. We hope to clean up a really messy sign jumble at the intersection pointing to Lake Cascade. Also we are proposing changing the signage for Armstrong Park to read that name and not ‘City Park’. Finally, with the support of the High School Advanced Biology Class, who recently won a $10,000 award from AARP, we propose signage for the park where their class project ‘Fischer Pond’ and the sports fields are, naming and signing the park ‘Fischer Pond Park’.

Idaho Power has volunteered equipment, and Idaho Power employees along with the Friends of the Cascade Whitewater Park will be performing a bathymetric (underwater) survey of the whitewater site sometime in May. This survey will provide necessary information for the engineering of the Whitewater Park.

Saturday, May 3 at 9am, volunteers will meet at Cascade Lake Realty, with hand trowels, shovels, brooms & buckets to spruce up Main Street. We will be removing several inches of dirt from the tree boxes that line Main, and placing a couple of inches of gravel into the boxes where the healthy trees live. Some of the trees are not so healthy due to being planted along with most of the plastic buckets they came in. The plastic will be dug out & removed to help the ill trees. Also, 10 planter barrels will be set up at the main intersections and planted with flowers by the garden club.

consolidating-fire-departments-is-a-good-idea.doc