MOSES LAKE — Jennifer Shipman and her daughter Tiffany were busy helping sweep the alley between Broadway and Third Avenue Saturday morning, all part of the effort by both the Downtown Moses Lake Association and the City of Moses Lake to clean up the city.

“I try to help whenever I can,” said Shipman, a commercial loan officer with Banner Bank in Moses Lake. “Whenever I can fit it into my schedule, I try to help out.”

As they sweep up dirt, leaves and tiny shards of shattered glass, the Shipmans pull at paper stuck to the ground. While this is the first time they’ve volunteered for the downtown cleanup, Jennifer said she and her daughter both volunteered to clean up after one of the big downtown parades last year and have helped at the Grant County Fairgrounds as well.

Tiffany grimaced a bit as she poked at what looked like an old cleaning wipe before grabbing it and tossing it in a garbage can. Jennifer said her daughter was also excited about volunteering to help when the call was first put out for volunteers.

“It’s a weird kind of fun, huh,” Jennifer said.

“Yeah,” Tiffany said.

The Downtown Moses Lake Association asked for volunteers to help clean up the alleys around downtown — the one alley that runs parallel between Third Avenue and Broadway and then the few short alleys that branch out southeast from Third Avenue — on Saturday, and got a few, according to DMLA Executive Director Rosenda Henley. The goal is to keep downtown a clean and safe place for people to visit, shop and do business.

“This is our community,” Henley said. “It’s just having a sense of pride in our own community. I feel like having it clean and having our families being able to come down and enjoy it is important. That’s the main reason I wanted to do it.”

Henley said the DMLA had been hoping to do the cleanup prior to Brew and Tunes, but the late winter weather simply wasn’t cooperating.

“So we partnered up with the city and Lakeside Disposal to make this happen on this nice day,” she said.

Chad Leeder, the operations supervisor for Moses Lake Lakeside Disposal, the company contracted to handle the city’s garbage, oversaw a crew, several large dump trucks, and a dumpster as cars trickled in slowly carrying everything from grass clippings to metal pipes to old mattresses and broken garden statuary.

“It’s not quite the turnout that I was hoping for but as far as what we’ve gotten, any little bit helps,” Leeder said.

It’s the kind of stuff people want to throw out but are oftentimes not sure how, so it sits in the garage, or a storage shed, or simply outside in the elements until a collection day, he said.

“A lot of honey-dos are getting done today,” Leeder added.

The city of Moses Lake and Lakeside Disposal will hold another collection day on Saturday, April 29, in the Surf n’ Slide Water Park parking lot, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. For more information, contact the city utility billing department at 509-764-3701.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherston@columbiabasinherald.com