When you’ve been denied as often as Daryl Supernaw has, you’ve got to keep a sense of humor.
“You can tell this is all kind of tongue-in-cheek,” he chuckles, speaking of the website (found here) he’s created to continue his 20-year-effort to fill the hazardous and unsightly ditch that runs along Atherton Street. Supernaw lobbied four separate City Councilmembers in the ditch’s 2nd District before Patrick O’Donnell made his dream a reality.
O’Donnell hosted an unveiling ceremony at the ditch site on Saturday, welcoming many community leaders to look to the future of filling the ditch with a more aesthetically pleasing design, featuring natural vegetation and plants.
Ground has officially broken on the project that will relieve the community of the ditch. It posed a problem in the past by overflooding and appearing to be a part of the street to motorists, and on more than one occasion a car ended up in the camoflauged booby trap.
Residents will no longer have to worry about that – or being subjected to the drab design – and Supernaw couldn’t be happier, awarding the first ever Golden Ditch Awards in his trademark humorous style. The awards were presented to Joe Sopo for outstanding achievement on the Schroeder Hall Reuse Prject, Mark Christoffels for outstanding engineering on the Atherton Ditch Improvement Project, and Councilmember O’Donnell for outstanding achievement in making the Atherton Ditch Improvement Project a reality.
No word yet on who’s in the running for the 2009 Ditchies.
By Ryan ZumMallen, Managing Editor