In our series on the 2025 Community Excellence Award applicants, we visit two Michigan communities brightening their neighborhoods—and their spirits—with creativity. The City of Hart’s resident-let “community spirit initiative” is growing its regional reputation as a destination for public art, and the City of Portage is bringing competitive holiday cheer with its annual Tricked Out and Decked Out holiday home decoration contests.

In the Heart of Hart, Public Art

2025 Community Excellence Award Entries: Art & Civic Pride

What became The HArt Project, the City of Hart’s resident-led “community spirit initiative,” started at the Michigan Municipal League Convention four years ago. City manager Rob Splane and then-Mayor Vicki Platt were in Grand Rapids, representing the lakeside Oceana County city of about 2,000 residents.

“ArtPrize was going on, and they had a Tin Man out front of the Amway Grand,” recalls Splane. “The mayor said, ‘Well, the Tin Man’s holding his heart; doesn’t that make sense that we should have something like that in Hart—where the Tin Man found his heart’?”

“I’m going, it’s cheesy, but it’s kind of endearing. So, we came away from Convention, and initially it was just, ‘Hey, we should get a Tin Man.’”

But the conversation grew. “We told a couple friends and decided to have a small meeting and see exactly what we could do to raise funds,” says Splane. “The one or two people that started became six, eight, 10 really fast.”

This casual, ad-hoc “committee” started holding meetings in a local theater. “It was crazy because within, like, three months, we had 60 or 70 people attending the meetings and the conversation went so fast from ‘Wait, do we want a Tin Man, or do we want art? Do we want artistic presence in the community to develop a culture?’” recalls Splane. “And man, it caught on like wildfire.” Now, The HArt Project is Hart’s submission for the 2025 Community Excellence Award.

The committee self-divided into groups prioritizing different city aesthetics. One decided to fundraise and take over responsibility of planting in some City gardens. “This year, we had about 40 people show up to plant flowers in the community gardens around our downtown core,” says Splane. Other groups sponsor weekly live music in Hart’s historic district and Hart Commons.

Yet another faction established a goal of fundraising 25 works of public art by 2025. As of this writing, the City is four works away from that goal, with two currently funded. The City is currently on the hunt for an artist to design a troll sculpture, funded by the organizers of the Electric Forest Festival in nearby Rothbury. “They’d like to see a troll under Hart Bridge, or adjacent to Hart Bridge, on Hart Lake,” says Splane.

The initiative is affiliated with the Hart Economic and Redevelopment Team, a nonprofit in town, but The HArt Project (a working title) is informal and bottom-up by design. “The more government you add, the less fun it becomes,” says Splane with a laugh. “People tend to be a little intimidated by those processes.”

One group of Hart residents built a war memorial on an island in Russell Creek, with a flagpole and solar lights. “It’s a really cool focal point walking through town as you look down the creek,” says Splane.

La Fiesta, a Mexican restaurant downtown, volunteered its exterior wall for a permanent mural. The City eventually landed upon Hugo Claudin, a Grand Rapids–based artist. (“He said ‘Here’s my price—but if it’s too much, I’ll do it for less.’” I said, ‘You’re a bad negotiator,’” laughs Splane.)

The City hosted public events for residents to tell stories about Hart, its history, and what it meant to them. Claudin used these stories to inform his design. The resulting 40-foot mural is titled Migration of the Hart, paying homage to the migrant workers and Hispanic immigrant families who have helped make Oceana County into an agricultural hub.

Flowers, music, sculpture, painting—whatever fire burns in a Hart resident’s heart, they are welcome in The HArt Project. “We didn’t want to … prevent people from being free to show up at any random meeting and say, hey, I’ve got an idea I’d like to talk about,” says Splane.

“The thought is by keeping it informal, it can retain that fun and that inclusiveness. We’re not bound to a framework where if you don’t fit into our framework, there’s no space for you. There’s space for anyone.”

“And every year, it grows.”

Portage Lights Up the Night

2025 Community Excellence Award Entries: Art & Civic Pride

The battle of holiday decor is lighting up neighborhoods in the City of Portage.

The year was 2022. The season: Christmas. “I thought—geez, everybody has Christmas lights,” says city manager Pat McGinnis. “We should do some sort of promotion.” The enthusiasm already in place, the City created a contest to highlight the most ambitious home holiday displays Portagers could come up with. The program later expanded to include Halloween. “Halloween has become its own thing … it’s really exploded,” says McGinnis. “I’m sure every community’s noticed that.”

Now four years in, the annual “Tricked Out” and “Decked Out” decorating contests are the City of Portage’s submission for the 2025 Community Excellence Award.

Portagers take pride in their yard decorations, and contests have become competitive. “It really is true folk art,” says McGinnis. “Some people have little fog machines going and everything—they really get into it … You see the family peeking out the windows, looking at the decoration peepers at both Halloween and Christmas.”

The City maps participating homes using GIS technology. “You tap on that address and then it opens up the window that shows you pictures of the house,” says McGinnis. “There’s a little map you can follow; you load the family in the car and drive around and check it out and take pictures.”

The process for selecting winners has varied, sometimes utilizing community voting using a QR code that links to a Google Form (though concerns about neighborhood ballot-stuffing have been raised by the City); other times a local family has been selected to drive around, view the entries, and be judge and jury.

Consumers Energy, the utility that services Portage, provided a small grant that the City uses as prize money for the first and second place winners. “We joke about it,” says McGinnis. “It’s like, ‘Well, you already burned this in your electric bill anyways, so good luck.’” Third place winners get dinner out, courtesy of a gift card donated by a local restaurant.

Tricked Out and Decked Out winners are recognized at City Council meetings. “The council has really warmed up to it,” says McGinnis. “The first year, there were some sideways glances. They hadn’t done a lot of things like this in Portage.” The public honor has become part of the appeal, and the presentations add a positive note to the council’s regular business. “That always makes the meeting go down a little easier,” says McGinnis. “Often there’s something on the agenda that’s causing somebody a little heartburn.”

“It’s good to start out from a place of sharing a little joke, some fun with your constituents—who otherwise would never show up [to a City Council meeting],” he says. “They’re having fun and they’re smiling and everybody’s happy.”

Last year, the holiday spirit finally got its claws into City departments. Police and fire stations, Public Works, the senior center, Parks and Rec, and City Hall all started taking part in their own Tricked Out and Decked Out contests, with the winning department receiving a pizza party. “Some departments are a little bit goofy, and they go over the top,” says McGinnis. “Our Community Development Department always goes absolutely bananas. Finance has been trying to knock them off this year.”

With a small budget and simple planning tools, McGinnis sees the contests as an easy way to build community. “There are so many reasons people have today to just stay inside,” he says. “They’re streaming, they’re watching sports, whatever. They’re not getting out there and talking to the neighbors.” The contests get Portage residents outside and talking to each other. “They’ll chat with the kids, they’ll make the werewolf do his howl, the kids all squeal. It just becomes this warm, fuzzy, cool community thing to build up that connectivity that’s maybe on the decline these days.”

“It can be super simple, or you could invest a lot of time in it, but anybody can do it.”

Author

Emily Landau

Emily is the League’s full-time Content Writer, composing emails, articles, blog posts, and press releases. If you need words, she has many. Prior to becoming a word person, she was a restaurant person, handling catering, event management, and marketing; prior still, she was a teaching person, at a private boarding school in Massachusetts. Having earned a master’s degree in Classics from the University of Georgia, Emily is confident that she is the only League employee fluent in Latin. She also enjoys cooking, stand-up comedy, and is an avid gamer, having achieved level 40 on her Steam profile.