The city of Aurora received some major sprucing up Saturday morning, thanks to a volunteer-driven clean-up event that took place from 9 a.m. until noon throughout all 10 wards in the city.
The first-ever Citywide Clean-Up Day event that city officials expected would attract hundreds of volunteers began at 8:30 a.m. Saturday at Water Street Mall in downtown Aurora where volunteers were welcomed with coffee and doughnuts and given materials needed for the clean-up effort.
Aurora Deputy Mayor Casildo Cuevas said plans to hold the citywide clean-up event came out of discussions about “what the community could do to bring all of us together as well as benefit our town.”
“I did some research and talked to people in the community and one of the ideas that came up was cleaning up after winter since there’s always a lot of garbage here and there,” Cuevas said. “We decided not one area, but rather let’s get all the wards and aldermen involved, get their buy-in. They know their community, they know their wards.”
The city contracted to work with Groot Recycling & Waste for the event, and the city’s streets department helped as well during the effort. Neighborhood groups were also mobilized to pitch in.
Yoselin Escalona, part of the leadership team from the Aurora Community Watch group, said interest in the clean-up event has been high since it was announced.
“One is that, on a personal level, I’m so excited. I’ve been here in Aurora since 2017 and to see the new approach we have with our current leadership and getting the community out and involved,” she said. “I’m in the 1st Ward and there has been a lot of interest.
“The second thing is our community watch group is taking a different approach as we’re going to be cleaning up a bike trail. We had a community member who was very concerned about the trash and brought his concern to us,” Yoselin said.
Randy Brown of Aurora said he was working as team leader for the 1st Ward and that the clean-up event was great because “it’s citywide.”
“It’s not just a small section of downtown Aurora. We’re going to hit the whole city. Unfortunately, the whole city right now is a mess,” Brown said. “Why not make the place you live as tidy as possible?”
Jamie Norris of Aurora also volunteered to help spruce up the city on Saturday.
“I volunteer here in the downtown a lot and thought I might as well help,” he said. “I saw this on the city website and wanted to come down and help. There’s no downside to this. As long as you can make the place look better, why not? It’s spring clean-up and I believe the cleaner it looks, the cleaner it will stay.”
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David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.