EVERETT —Both city of Everett and PUD leaders cut the ribbon Saturday on El Sol al Alcance de tus Manos (“The sun at your fingertips”) community solar array and public-art installation now standing on 1.75 acres of city land next to Walter E. Hall Park along Casino Road in South Everett.
“This project is a perfect example of that, bringing renewable energy into the community while also reflecting the beauty and creativity and identity of this neighborhood,” Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin opened with the kind of local pride that has marked Everett’s recent work in south-side neighborhoods. “And I just love the artwork showcased on the fence behind us.”
Franklin was equally pleased with the new community pathway the city built to link the Westmont and Holly neighborhoods more safely into the park. Residents and partners had asked for better connections, she said and City crews delivered with an accessible path that now sits beside the solar array.
“These are the kinds of investments that strengthen neighborhoods, improving the places people use every day and creating better connections within our community,” Franklin added.
The 400-kilowatt solar array generates enough electricity in a year to power about 30 homes. Because Casino Road carries a high summer load from nearby industrial activity, the panels also help ease pressure on the local grid on the hottest days ,a PUD official told the Lynnwood Times. All the value from the power the PUD buys from the array goes into the Community Energy Fund, that is administered by St. Vincent de Paul to provide emergency bill help to income-qualified customers—to date approximately more than $40,000 in assistance to about 200 families.
More than 80% of the roughly $2.5 million project was covered by state and federal grants and tax credits. Those included an $861,814 award from the Washington Clean Energy Fund 3 Low-Income Community Solar Deployment Program, support from the Community Solar Expansion Program run by the WSU Energy Program, and the federal Investment Tax Credit with a bonus credit.
Jennifer Grove, assistant director of energy at the Washington Department of Commerce, told attendees that choosing this project for the large state grant was the easy part.
“What makes projects like this special is that they’re shaped by the people who live here,” Grove said. “When utilities, community organizations and residents collaborate, the result is more than just clean energy on our grid. It’s local art. It’s shared pride.”
She called community solar “protein on solar” — dense with both climate benefit and affordability.
“We’re demonstrating that we don’t have to choose between affordable energy, a healthy community and climate action,” Grove shared.
PUD Commissioner Sid Logan, who served as emcee for Saturday’s ribbon cutting event, described the project as an artichoke with many layers of community benefit. He credited the City of Everett’s public works, parks and real estate staff, specifically Ryan Sass and Katherine Phillips, and recognized former commissioner Rebecca Wolfe, who was on the board when the work began.
The name for the site, El Sol al Alcance de tus Manos, came from neighbors at the 2022 Connect Casino Road Summer Carnival, Logan shared.
Commissioner Julieta Altamirano-Crosby, who represents District 2, returned to that origin story sharing that the PUD wanted a project developed with the neighborhood and not just simply placed it in it.
“That name reflects a powerful idea: that renewable energy, opportunity, and support should be within reach for everyone,” Altamirano-Crosby said. “It reminds us that clean energy is not just about technology. It is about people. It is about access. It is about community.”
She thanked the three local artists, the students whose painted suns and hands now cover the fence, and partners that included Connect Casino Road, Horizon Elementary, the Westmont Holly Neighborhood Association, Denny Juvenile Justice Center, the Mukilteo School District and the Snohomish County Conservation District.
Councilmember Luis Burbano, whose Everett District 4 includes the site, spoke non how infrastructure has often separated people, but now, with the new walk path, it does the opposite.
“We are connecting the Westmont neighborhood with Casino Road,” Burbano said. “When communities are connected, people learn about each other and folks start to take care of each other because it is easy to worry about someone else once you connect a face with a name, with a family, with a kid.”
The trail will also give his daughter Hannah, he added, a shorter walk to the new Walter E. Hall Park playground that is scheduled to open in late 2027. Combined with the solar array already helping neighbors with bills, he said, the project is a practical example of taking care of one another.
CEO John Haarlow said that objective of El Sol al Alcance de tus Manos from the start, was providing not only clean energy to help the grid but also direct community benefit.
“It’s clean energy, but it’s also a place of learning, artwork, and pride for the people who helped bring it to life,” Haarlow said.
The artists of El Sol al Alcance de tus Manos
Luisana Hernandez, Ruben Trujillo and Yessica Marquéz spent more than a year turning a community-chosen name into a single installation. The PUD and city of Everett already wanted hands and suns, and the three Everett artists were asked to design around that idea.
Mary Williams of the Mukilteo School District first approached Marquéz, who had worked with the district before. Marquéz immediately thought of her longtime colleagues — Trujillo, a muralist comfortable at large scale, and Hernandez, a poet and abstract mixed-media artist.
“This is my community. I live here,” Marquéz, a 20-year resident of Everett told the Lynnwood Times. “There’s more than just me as a brown person being an artist here.”
The hands and suns were pained by youth from Horizon Elementary classrooms, the PUD Energy Block Party, Denny Youth Center and other community events.
Hernandez and the others taught a lesson at Horizon Elementary on making art from trash and texture so that students in socioeconomic hardship would also be included in the project. Their efforts resulted in nearly 1,000 treated-wood suns and hands, sealed against weather, so the children can come back years later and find their own work.
The four large panels of El Sol al Alcance de tus Manos tell a connected story.
Trujillo’s opening section shows a solar robot leaving a cityscape. He used CNC-cut pieces, painted surfaces and recycled PUD salvage metal — hinges and bits of equipment. Moths and butterflies, many made from discarded materials, represent change and metamorphosis.
A central butterfly, built with help from the other two artists, stands for the growth that happens when people work together.
Trujillo, whose Everett murals include a large piece at Everett Downtown Storage off Hewitt and work at Rockefeller Art Studio and Jackson Park, said pop culture, color and storytelling pushed him outside his usual box. More of Trujillo’s contributions to art may be found on Instagram at Facebook at Ruben.The.Artist and at https://www.rubentheartist.com/.
Hernandez wrote the poems that appear on scrolls introducing each section.
The robot’s last thought, from the first panel, becomes the next panel’s line: “Surrender what you think you know, plant the seeds you wish to grow.”
The large stained-glass-inspired abstract panels, Hernandez said, are the biggest work she has made.
As singer-songwriter, poet and food-security advocate who has worked in mixed media for decades, Hernandez said community itself is her inspiration. She truly appreciated Snohomish PUD for including women of color to craft this art and would like to see more abstract public art in Snohomish County.
“The number of women of color and abstract art who are represented in public art is so small,” Hernandez told the Lynnwood Times. “The majority of opportunities go…. So, it’s one of those things where this particular project to me means a lot because we’re all artists of color. The majority of the children who did these are children of color because [a lot of] it was done at Horizon Elementary school.”
Research has consistently linked children’s participation in the arts with gains in social-emotional and cognitive development. A National Endowment for the Arts review of early-childhood studies found that music, dance, and visual-art activities are associated with stronger social skills, cooperation, empathy, and emotion regulation. Visual-art practice is tied to improvements in spatial reasoning, working memory, and attention—skills that support classroom learning.
More of Hernandez’s contributions to art may be found on Instagram and Facebook, at SwimmingTheFeels.
Marquéz, a watercolor artist who also works in glow-in-the-dark pieces and sculpture, created the naturescape panel: an aluminum hummingbird whose wings become flowers, plus moths, dragonflies, mushrooms and wildflowers formed from PUD wire and other recycled stock.
Seattle Metalworks did the CNC cutting; she and the others painted and assembled everything by hand. The inspiration came from a walk to the nearby community garden that neighbors started on their own.
The hummingbird, she said, is a full-circle homage to nature and to drawing sweetness from what is already there. Some of her work at El Sol al Alcance de tus Manos glows under black light—however she cautions visitors who come at night to view it, to not walk off the paved trail as the natural ground near the artwork is uneven.
All three artists told the Lynnwood Times that the PUD gave them unusual creative freedom which they appreciated and specifically wanted to thank PUD facilities staff for the raw material.
“I think this project opened up more opportunities for more of these things to come from PUD,” Marquéz said. “The feedback that I got from them was that they want to see more of this.”
Beyond Everett, the PUD is also putting art at the Woods Creek Hydroelectric Project and Sustainability Center in Monroe with a large mural for the powerhouse exterior that is to be unveiled this fall. The work is meant to greet students on field trips and neighbors who visit the run-of-the-river plant, tying clean energy to local ecology, stewardship, and the surrounding woods and water.
Author: Mario Lotmore
