Rod Sell was front and center at the Oregon 150 Youth Legacy Project celebration at Cheadle Lake last week, as he should have been.

The former city maintenance department manager, now city special projects grants manager, is largely responsible for improvements at the lake.

It's no small accomplishment.

Writing successful grants is not easy. The competition is tough and the people with the money to give out often are particular about requests.

But writing is only half the job for Sell. After he's gotten the funding, then he has managed the projects.

In one case especially, the 2008/09 Youth Legacy Grant, that demanded stupendous coordination of volunteers. To keep track of the effort, he prepared a spreadsheet showing tasks, the month the task was to be done, task status and group assigned.

The spreadsheet showed 35 tasks to be done over eight months by more than 15 organizations.

In the past eight years, Sell has written 19 successful grants that brought in $1.795 million for the city, all for parks. The smallest was $250 for an Arbor Day celebration; the largest was $1 million to purchase 10.21 acres at the south end of Cheadle Lake.

Of the total, more than $1.2 million from the grants has gone into development around the lake.

Overall, the money has been used to buy property, rehabilitate city park facilities, build trails, install a playground and more.

As in the Youth Legacy Grant, the money often has parleyed volunteer efforts into matching credits worth tens of thousands of dollars.

Sell also was one of the early movers on Build Lebanon Trails (BLT).

About five years ago, he heard the Community Health Improvement Partnership (CHIP) coordinator make a presentation about the CHIP goal of forming partnerships to promote community health.

He talked to her afterward about a fledgling city effort to establish trails. From that conversation came BLT.

BLT now has 10 members on its steering committee and BLT-sponsored hikes draw from 30 to more than 150 people. It is one of the more successful volunteer efforts in town.

Although the maintenance division of the city may miss Sell's leadership, the community will benefit from his focused effort to obtain funds for local projects.

Sell already has been recognized for his contributions to Lebanon; he was named Man of the Year for 2007.

Hopefully he has many years of civic activity yet to come.