Fired up for art

There are waiting lists for organ transplants and low-income housing and even season tickets to University of Oregon football.

But a waiting list to paint fire hydrants?

It’s a story that’s so Eugene, it’s a scream — one hydrant is even painted as a slug queen.

A neighborhood association comes up with a project to build community, a sense of pride and a sense of place. Everyone rallies and suddenly — oops — the South University neighborhood has more would-be hydrant painters than it does hydrants to paint.

“I’m hoping another neighborhood wants to do theirs, so I can hand (those on the waiting list) off to them,” South University Neighborhood Association secretary Mimi McGrath Kato said with a laugh.

With 31 fire hydrants in a 48-square-block area — bordered by East 18th and East 24th avenues on the north and south, and Hilyard and Agate streets on the west and east — the project has proven so popular that every hydrant has been claimed and the waiting list to paint is currently at 10 residents. The only chance for those folks now is if someone signed up to paint one of the last five remaining hydrants changes their mind, and finds something better to do with their summertime than get creative with that iron chunk of municipal water supply on the corner.

McGrath Kato, who cleaned all the standard-yellow fire hydrants with a wire brush and coated them with a primer, didn’t even claim one for herself to paint.

“No,” she said Tuesday, watching neighbor Rogene Manas paint the one by Manas’ home on the corner of East 22nd and Agate. “So many people wanted to do it, I felt guilty taking one.”

McGrath Kato pitched the idea at a monthly neighborhood board meeting last fall in the hopes of getting a grant from the city’s Neighborhood Matching Grant program for a neighborhood project. A research assistant in the University of Oregon’s College of Education, she has experience in writing grants. After getting permission from the Eugene Fire Department, she wrote up a proposal to the city asking for $750 in matching funds, which was only a third of the neighborhood’s match in sweat equity, valued at $2,232 based on the city’s rate of $18 per volunteer hour times an estimated 124 volunteer hours (two volunteers for each of the 31 hydrants, times an estimated two hours of work on each one).

McGrath Kato used the grant money to purchase supplies, paint and brushes to make 31 kits for neighbors, and even had $118 left over that she gave back to the city.

The fire department’s only stipulation was that the tops of the hydrants (the nut and bonnets) not be painted by volunteers, McGrath Kato said. (Fire departments paint them different colors depending on available water flow.)

Neighbors met at Edison Elementary School on June 19 to get their paint kits. The fire department brought a truck and gear to show neighborhood kids, then everyone headed off to paint. Others painted when they could, such as Manas, who started on June 21 with her grandchildren, Celia, 10, and Peter, 8, who were visiting from Portland. They painted the base turquoise, and the main barrel purple, with the top and side outlets red with yellow and orange trim. But they took a lot of breaks.

“Most painted theirs in a day,” said Manas, as she outlined the finishing touches, flowers, in black. “But my grandkids have the attention span of a gnat, so we had to keep stopping and go to the (Amazon) pool.” That left Manas finishing the project on Tuesday.

“It looks like a family neighborhood when all the fire hydrants are painted,” Manas said.