Mainers heed Bush in N.Y. spruce-up

NEW YORK – Jerry Hudson of Brewer, an alternate delegate attending the Republican National Convention, was only too happy to roll up his sleeves and get down in the dirt on Tuesday.

Hudson was among a dozen or so Maine delegates and alternates who donned gloves and grabbed rakes to help spruce up Staten Island’s 200-acre Clove Lakes Park, which had been struck by vandals over the weekend.

Replacing mulch and replanting chrysanthemums, day lilies and a winter creeper known as euonymous, the delegates weeded and dug their response to President Bush’s call for “Compassion Across America.”

The community service program calls on Americans to volunteer their time to improve public facilities.

“Public service is something that we have forgotten about in this country and our service to our fellow man is what’s made us a great country – this is just a good testimony to that,” Hudson said. “Look, here we have a group of people from Maine who have come down to Staten Island to help people with a little problem they have.”

Tom Paulo of the Staten Island parks commission doesn’t know where the borough’s 8,000 acres of parks would be without volunteers.

“It does provide assistance to do things that, given our staffing, we might not be able to do and it imparts a sense of ownership to the volunteer groups who become protective of it,” Paulo said.

Pete Cianchette – the Maine delegation chairman from South Portland who pledged the state’s GOP votes to President Bush Monday evening – said the park project was a good one for Mainers.

“This is a great opportunity for the delegates to go out together and do something fun and leave the city a little better than we found it,” he said.

A last-minute schedule change that still hasn’t been fully explained to Maine GOP Chairman Katherine Watson wound up diverting the Maine delegates from a clean-up operation in China Town to Staten Island – the lone Republican borough in the city of New York.

Although he hadn’t planned on doing much gardening while he was in New York, Hancock delegate Jack Bridges said he believed in the president’s message on the need for community service.

“You need to give back and help out wherever you can,” he said. “It’s a lot of fun and it’s a lot of community spirit from a lot of good people. We’re Maine people and we like to give and work hard. We also don’t mind getting our hands dirty.”

Speaking on behalf of GOP leadership, former Montana Gov. Marc Raciot said actions like those exhibited by Maine delegates Tuesday would further President Bush’s community service goals.

In a recent interview, former President Clinton derided the GOP’s compassionate conservative ideals by saying it was a face Republicans only showed “every four years.”

“You know, I think that’s really small in terms of giving a reasonable thoughtful objective view of what we’ve done,” Raciot said. “It’s an unfortunate attempt to minimize what it is that we think is the heart and soul of our party. We’re dedicated in excess of 16,000 hours in community service projects across this country.”