Members of the Dumont community recently formed a non-profit organization, “Revitalize Dumont,” an effort to restore the school building and other structures in the city.
There are five board members with “Revitalize Dumont,” including city councilmember Mike Day, two directors of the Dumont Telephone Company Board Mike Thornburgh and Danny Shear; and Jeff Kolb, who is with the Butler-Grundy Development Alliance. Roger Kregel is the other board member and tells RadioOnTheGo News how the idea got started.
“We’ve seen the past year how the school property is obviously not being utilized. People are using it to dispose junk on and it just got to the point where some of us in the community wanted to make a change and make it better. So by chance, we noticed that the school property was on a tax delinquent sale last June and a couple of us just got talking and we was able to this fall, organize this nonprofit organization and actually purchase the property off in the tax delinquent sale.”
One of the top priorities for the group is to restore the school building. Thornburgh says once that gets restored, the group will look at other buildings to refurbish down the road.
“We think that maybe this is the key part of that happening. If we get the school looking good again, and at least in the memories of the people that grew up around here, and it isn’t an eyesore anymore, we can look at other properties that we think need attention to to bring those back as well.”
Kolb says a non-profit organization like this will be beneficial for Dumont.
“Nobody likes to see an eyesore like that, and there’s, I’ll call them vacated school buildings in dozens if not hundreds of small communities across the state. And some communities have done a great job of taking what could be considered a negative connotation, turning it into a positive opportunity. So when Roger shared with me that there was finally going to be some positive steps made to get the school building back into local control, which is extremely important, that this is an opportunity. To me, I look at it as a reset. You know, we’re starting over. We’re gonna act like it just became vacated and start over with some positive steps going forward, finding a reuse for it that’s a good fit for the community.”
Kregel says all options are on the table for the use of the school building, including storage, housing or use as a community center.
Pictured: The school building in Dumont, one of the structures “Revitalize Dumont” is looking to restore.
