(Lander, WY) – Lander City Park will be getting some new public drinking fountains soon as part of a LOR Foundation project that was spearheaded by a local student.
Paiglee Michael – now a freshman at Casper College – said she came up with the idea last year when she was a senior in high school working on her capstone project for her advanced placement environmental sciences class.
The assignment was to come up with an environmental sciences project that would benefit the entire community, then try to implement the project, Michael said – so she wanted to think of a proposal that “could actually be done.”
As she set about researching her chosen topic – plastic waste reduction – she identified that “practically doable” idea: installing new water fountains with bottle filling stations at Lander City Park.
Research
Institutions that have installed water bottle filling stations have been able to track the amount of plastic waste diverted as a result, according to a 2018 study on the use of water bottle filling stations at the University of Chicago.
For example, the Hilton San Fransisco Union Square reported that they were able to avoid 200,000 plastic water bottles over a span of 10 months after they installed eight filling stations at the property, according to the study.
Similarly, the study reported that Duke University installed 50 filling stations between January 2014 and October 2015, and the move helped save approximately 400,000 plastic water bottles during that timeframe.
Michael collected similar statistics as she researched her project, and she also spent time tracking usage at the school drinking fountains, revealing that local students used the fountains to fill hundreds of water bottles each day.
Parks and Rec
After compiling her data, Michael scheduled a meeting with the Lander Parks and Recreation Department to talk about her proposal.
At that point, Michael said, she had “no expectations of this (project) actually … happening,” but after she described her idea, she said Parks and Recreation Office Manager Lori Eckhart got “pretty excited.”
“She (said) they’ve been waiting for something like this to happen,” Michael recalled, explaining that the current set of outdoor drinking fountains at Lander City Park are “old” and “hard to use.”
They also leak, Assistant Mayor RaJean Strube Fossen told the Lander City Council during a recent meeting.
A press release from the LOR Foundation says the current water stations are “more than 30 years old, so the water doesn’t come out very well (if at all), and the city can no longer find replacement parts.”
The Parks and Recreation Department had already been talking about replacing the water fountains, LOR Foundation Lander Community Officer Ami Vincent said – the project just “hadn’t made it to the top of their priority list yet.”
That’s why Eckhart suggested Michael connect with Vincent to see if the LOR Foundation might be interested in funding the drinking fountain project.
LOR Foundation
Vincent was “stoked about the idea” from the beginning, Michael said, so she worked with the LOR Foundation to secure a $29,594 grant for the project.
The money will support the purchase and installation of four “modern” water stations, the LOR Foundation said.
The outdoor installations will feature a water bottle refilling station, two drinking fountains of differing heights to accommodate children and people with disabilities, and a pet-accessible drinking fountain at the bottom, the press release states.
Michael said she “got into some deep research” as she set about working with the city and the LOR Foundation to select a design for the stations that fit their budget.
“(It was) complicated,” she said. “(There were) all these different brands and all these different components.”
Some water stations came with shoe-cleansing devices, she said, while others were outfitted with coolers and individual filters, but those additional elements were “pretty expensive,” so she turned her focus to a “low-maintenance” model that would be “easy to shut off in the winter.”
The outdoor water stations from Most Dependable Fountains Inc. arrived in Lander on Monday, and Community Development Coordinator Anne Even said they should be installed this fall or early winter so they are “ready for use in the spring.”
Public works director Lance Hopkin said the new fountains will replace the current drinking stations at Lander City Park, which are located near the restroom at the back of the park, by the Lions Shelter, and beside the tennis courts, with an indoor version in the Parks and Recreation building at City Park.
He added that the project is “growing” in scope, with “other places in town that want to be sponsored for potentially more bottle-filling stations.”
The proposed second portion of the drinking fountain project hasn’t been finalized yet, Vincent said, but it arose at the request of another Lander resident, who recently approached the LOR Foundation asking for funding to place three or four more water stations “around town” for people out walking, running or biking.
Michael said it’s “super cool and awesome for our community” that the LOR Foundation is available to support citizen-led projects like the drinking fountain effort, and she encouraged other local residents to approach the organization with “whatever comes into mind that you want in the community.”
“(They) make it possible to have their projects go forward and get created based on their ideas without having to go through systematic processes,” she said. “It makes it like 10 times easier.”
For more information call the LOR Foundation at (307) 349-2654.