The City of Norwich is seeking submissions from residents for flag designs that may be incorporated into the city's first ever city flag. More information on the flag design project will be posted to the City of Norwich Facebook page and on NorwichNewYork.net when it becomes available. (Photo by Sarah Genter)

NORWICH — Monday, April 17 marks the 207th anniversary of the City of Norwich Founders Day, since it was established as a village in 1816 on Sunday, April 17. The city is celebrating with a community collaboration project: residents are encouraged to design their own city flag to submit for the chance for their design, or elements of it, to become the first ever City of Norwich flag.

City of Norwich Historian Agnes Eaton said she had the idea thanks to a few flag collectors who called looking for a city flag.

"A couple years ago I had a couple people call that collect flags and say, ‘do you have a city flag, and if you do, could we maybe get one?’ And through my research I could find that we’ve ever had a city flag," she said. "Then by chance I saw the article about Syracuse that is redoing their city flag. So I thought that was a nice way to do Founders Day, especially since we’ve had some interest in a city flag in the previous couple of years."

Eaton said she plans to put information on flag criteria and submission information on the City of Norwich website, NorwichNewYork.net, and the City of Norwich Facebook page. Resources will also include links to articles about flag design, as Eaton said there are certain elements that make "good flags" and "bad flags."

"We’ll do like a kick off for Founders Day, and it’s pretty much going to be a year-long process, opening it up to everybody to send in a possible design. We’ll have criteria that they’ve got to meet, and I’m thinking about having just a dedicated web page on our website for that," said Eaton.

"They have to represent the city," she continued. "So it’s not just somebody can put a design together and submit it. They have to tell us why they put certain elements in it to reflect the City of Norwich."

She said there are around five criteria she's found for a good flag design, and the most important one is, "it should be simple enough for a child to design from memory."

"Nothing complicated, no words on it. It should be symbols that represent things, are representative of our community. No city seal," she added.

Both Eaton and City of Norwich Mayor Brian Doliver hope the city flag design project will serve as an avenue for community collaboration and pride.

"It’s supposed to be like a community event, you know? Something to show community pride and everybody’s now having issues with things that are going on. This is a nice way to show, physically show, some support for our community," said Eaton. "It’s much nicer than a committee just saying, okay, this is our design, and that’s it. Because there’s so many creative people out there, they might think of something that’s out of the box or that we haven’t thought of. So why not get the ideas flowing with everybody?"

"We have a lot of challenges in our community, and we are aware. We’re dedicated to working on these challenges, but we have to look at everything completely, and I think this is going to help instill pride in our community," Doliver added.

Although the pair was open to the possibility of one design being chosen as the city flag, they said they expect to incorporate several elements from submissions to create a true collaboration of the community's ideas.

"We wouldn’t pick one idea, we might pick out ten ideas. So we could, you know, this symbol or that symbol. We could institute three, four, or five ideas onto the one flag," said Doliver.

They're also looking for ways to include the community's children in the project, possibly by tying the ongoing project into Flag Day, which falls on Wednesday, June 14 this year.

"Flag Day is in June, so there’s also like a little kit for students in schools if they wanted to do a little flag project, or that kind of thing. So it kind of carries it through. Instead of just Founders Day it can go with Flag Day," Eaton explained.

More information on the flag design project will be posted to the City of Norwich Facebook page and on NorwichNewYork.net when it becomes available. Doliver said he hopes to form a committee to oversee the project and make advisements on the design.

In addition to the flag project, Eaton has been hard at work researching all the aldermen that have served the City of Norwich since it's incorporation as a city in 1914. The information will be consolidated into a historical article listed on the city website.

In celebration of Founders Day last year, Eaton wrote an article detailing the history of City of Norwich mayors, which can be found at NorwichNewYork.net/government/historian.php. The city is also accepting historical articles written by residents, which can be submitted to Eaton at aeaton@norwichnewyork.net.

Plus, in her spare time, Eaton has been working to organize and manage the city records, kept at the former wastewater treatment plant on Hale Street. She said some records are permanent, such as capital improvement project records, while others only need to be retained anywhere from six months to six years.

"The financial records are only six years. Police records are a lot longer. Community development could be permanent because if they get funds from the state, we have to keep those pretty much forever," Eaton explained. "FOILs, I only have to keep them for six months. I think those are probably the shortest. I would say probably 90 percent of the stuff is like six years, or maybe 80 percent, and the rest is probably permanent. Like human resource records are considered permanent records."

The city has already budgeted money to hire an outside contractor to do an inventory of all the records, and once that is complete they'll be able to apply for a grant to scan and digitize all the records.

"So we did put money in the budget to do an inventory, because after the inventory hopefully we can scan a lot of the records and then free up a lot of space that way. But it’s required in order to get a grant for the scanning that you do the inventory first. So step one," said Eaton.

Eaton has been the City of Norwich for around a year, and she said she's been enjoying the position so far.

"It’s been interesting. You know, writing articles and doing the research, like the article I’m doing now is just basically looking through all the minute books and trying to get that timeline of the aldermen, for each alderman. So yeah, I enjoy doing the research and fitting it in with all the other stuff," she said.