Peggy Revell
Free flowers caused a frenzy early Friday morning as people filled the parking lot at Pither’s Point Park to get their hands on the surplus flats being given out by the Town of Fort Frances’ Parks and Cemeteries department.
“It was minutes,” said Operations and Facilities manager Doug Brown regarding the amount of time it took for the 81 flats of flowers to disappear. “The [student workers] basically started work at 7:30, they loaded the all the flowers to the back of two vehicles, drove up to [Pither’s Point Park]. It probably took longer to load them and bring them there then to get rid of them.”
“There was a little bit of mayhem,” he added, noting that when the summer students arrived there were around 100 people there, and no order.
“Not everyone got flowers, and I’m kind of upset about that,” Brown said, adding that while there was a limit of one flat per household this time, should the town do this again they will be looking at limiting the amount per person even further.
In the past, the town’s procurement policy saw either the surplus flowers taken home by town employees, or destroyed, Brown explained.
“I didn’t think that was appropriate procurement policy,” he noted. “[So] what we did this time, instead of destroying them or giving them to the town employees is we opened it up to the general public.”
And while this was the first time the town has had a public giveaway of the surplus flowers, Brown noted that it may or may not be happening again in the future, since the town is working to further refine the number of flowers they order.
“What happens is, it depends on weather, depends on frost, whether or not we have [flowers] left over,” said Brown, noting that the town places their orders in December for the approximate 55,000 flowers they plant during the warmer months.
“We don’t usually order as many as we did and we’re going to get our number down, so [the surplus giveaway] might happen next year, [but] it probably won’t happen because we’ll get a more refined number of how many flowers we order,” he said. “So we’re just going to improve.”
Twenty-four flats are still being held as surplus by the town, he added, to “spruce up” things incase of a drought or if flowers die, and to ensure all the graves in the cemeteries have flowers.
