Scout to head up citywide painting job for Eagle project

Shiner Boy Scout Thomas Klozik delivered one of the most impressive presentations anyone had seen in the Shiner city council chambers in quite some time when he went before city leaders on Tuesday, Sept. 6.

The young man said he’d been out looking around the city and, because he noticed it needed doing, he volunteered to scrape clean any curbing that may need it, and then come back with the requisite red paint in most places, and yellow—he paused to look back, at that point, making eye contact with Shiner Fire Chief Billy Petru when he did so, before he finished his sentence—“yellow is for any high pressure fire hydrants the city may have, if you wouldn’t mind showing me where those are.”

And with a decisive nod from both, a bargain was struck with not so much as a word spoken between them.

It’s for the Eagle Scout project he was proposing, Klozik said. While the hydrants themselves can’t be painted any other color than what they are, each curb is also supposed to have so-and-so many feet of its curbing on either side of the hydrants painted with the appropriately colored paint to serve as a warning for drivers not to park their vehicles there.

Although many had indeed been painted once, the Eagle Scout candidate told councilmen that the years hadn’t been kind to several of them. It’s why he thought it might be a useful project the community might benefit from.

Based on his research going up and down every street in town to locate them, Klozik said he believed there would be 87 hydrants in all, but admitted he may have missed one someplace, so he welcomed a staff review of his list to make sure he got them all.

What’s more, he told city leaders, he’s already lined up helpers and figured out about how much paint he would need, how much that might cost, and had fundraisers planned to help fund the project. All he needed was their blessing to move forward.

And with that, a mighty impressed city council did just as he asked, with one caveat: Councilman Will Franklin suggested he get with Police Chief Kevin Kelso before he and his crews began to see if they couldn’t arrange for some escorts as they work some of the busier streets around town, to help slow traffic down around their work areas.

Klozik said he’d get working on those fundraisers and once he’s made his budget, he’d get with the city and the police to make their plans. Ideally, he said he believed that he and his crews, working together, could knock the project out in a weekend or two, tops.