ou may have seen them on some recent Wednesday morning, out in front of the North Side Kmart at the corner of U.S. 50 and Elizabeth Street with their bright orange T-shirts and toiling away at putting the landscaping back in order. Behind them, a Municipal Court van was parked. All that was missing was a fat guy with sunglasses and a shotgun, musing: “You gonna fit in real good, of course, unless you get rabbit in your blood and you decide to take off for home. … What we got here is a failure to communicate. … You gonna get your mind right.” “It’s true. We look like convicts in our orange shirts,” laughed City Council President Barb Vidmar, one of a half dozen women in the Wednesday Weeders, a group dedicated to making Pueblo look better one project at a time.

“At one time we called ourselves the Marauding Band of Trespassers, because a property owner came out and told us to leave,” Vidmar added, adjusting her gloves and looking like she wasn’t going anywhere.

She and her fellow travelers ? Diane Patterson, Karen Smith, Sally Berryman, Jacquie Huffaker and Suzie Simons ? have been working on the U.S. 50 project for about two months, transforming mounds of weeds into the tidy islands of shrubbery they were meant to be.

This particular project started when Berryman, a nice woman who writes congratulatory letters to business owners who keep their property up to snuff, began complaining incessantly (or so it seemed) to Patterson, a landscape architect.

“This area is so visible,” Patterson said.

Like sculptors staring at a block of rock and seeing David, the ladies set about to find the inner garden on this particular patch of prairie. Well, maybe it wasn’t like that at all, but it’s fun to imagine them seeing it that way.

Anyway, there were obstacles ? big obstacles ? to actually doing this project.

“At first, we asked Kmart management if we could work there, but they told us it was state property,” Patterson.

Actually, the Colorado Department of Transportation claims responsibility for maintaining the corner. Remember that caboose that used to be parked there? No, it didn’t fall into a sinkhole. No, it wasn’t consumed by kudzu. CDOT had it removed because it was in the state right-of-way.

The problem, as the Weeders saw it, was that CDOT absolutely was not maintaining the area. What’s more, their first inquiry was met with a bureaucratic response: The area was too close to too much traffic for the Adopt-A-Highway program.

“There’s a sidewalk right over there. People walk on it,” Patterson explained. “And we’re not anywhere near the sidewalk.”

Vidmar was able to convince Tim Harris, CDOT’s area guy, that the regulations in this case did not make a whole lot of sense.

Plus, the women wear those bright orange shirts.

That’s another story. CDOT, after making them watch the road warrior training video, required them to wear orange vests.

“They were too darn hot,” Vidmar said. “We went to Target and bought these shirts.”

CDOT has come around 180 degrees on its stance, admitting that its own funds are insufficient to do much more than mow the area. In fact, CDOT recently provided 42 tons of golden sunset breeze (a fine gravel that stays in place) to mulch around the plants.

The Weeders enlisted help through municipial Judge William “Night Court” Alexander to line up a few strong young men to help with the project, as well as a stray college student or two.

The result is that one of the main entry points to Pueblo looks a heck of a lot better thanks to the efforts of these women.

Chances are you drive by the area and don’t even notice it … unless the “convicts” happen to be out walking around.

If the Not My Job Corps had a membership roster, we’d be glad to sign up the Wednesday Weeders. Vidmar called me up after I mentioned she’d been spotted spraying weeds, but before I’d published a column lamenting the lonely nature of unofficial outdoor cleanups and advocated Pueblo Progressive Pickup Parties. This is just the sort of thing I was talking about.

“You’d be surprised how many people are out there doing things like this,” Vidmar said.

She said the group has done some other, smaller areas around town and plans to do more, but this one ? like all projects ? has taken more time than they expected.

Tags: berryman, city council president, colorado department, congratulatory letters, diane patterson, dozen women, fellow travelers, huffaker, karen smith, nice woman, orange shirts, state property

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