During the COVID-19 pandemic, Helper City is doing its part to keep its citizens safe and Castle Country Radio caught up with Mayor Lenise Peterman to talk about the precautions the city has taken at this time.

“We have been following the state directives, we jumped on that immediately, closing the Helper Public Library, Western Mining & Railroad Museum and actually locking our City Hall, still keeping it open to take calls, payments and such. So, we were pretty aggressive in making that happen as quickly as the state was,” explained Mayor Peterman.  The city recently closed off all the playgrounds in the city as there is no way to sanitize that type of equipment at this time.

As of April 1, the International Dark Sky Association recently added Helper to its certified list. “We’re the second community in Utah and we’re the 25th actually in the world, so it’s no small feat of what we’ve been able to accomplish and we will continue undertake educating our residents of what this means and improving how we’re lighting even today moving forward so that we’re just very cognizant of making sure we can step out of our doors and see the night time skies,” stated Mayor Peterman. This has been quite a process for the city so to finally be recognized as a Dark Sky Community is a huge accomplishment.

The River Restoration Project is still in the works and Phase Five is currently underway as Peterman explains, “It’s a little bit north of our Historic Main Street so we are pleased that is happening and we’re actually busy at work funding for Phase Six which will be our biggest and really our most amazing stage because we want to build a really nice begin point where people can recreate about three miles from the Gilotti’s Pond all the way down in to Main Street and beyond.” In the next few weeks city officials should start hearing back from a few of the grants they applied for.