Erick Gonzalez, with Angel and Armondo Villa: Bright lights, clean city. Christmas wreathes and solar-powered holiday lights are coming to Grand Avenue, as a neighborhood crew worked early Friday morning to brighten up the busy business corridor — as part of a neighborhood-wide cleanup effort.Just as the sun rose and before kids and their families began to arrive at school, Erick Gonzalez, the manager of the Grand Avenue Special Services District (GASSD), supervised the installation of bands of light on the bare trees in front of the Family Academy of Multilingual Exploration (F.A.M.E. School), the dual-language kindergarten-through-eighth grade school on the northeast corner of Grand and Blatchley.Climbing up the ladders and threading the branches of the trees in front of the sidewalk-level classroom windows were Angel and Armondo Villa. They are two of five members of the same family who comprise the Fair Haven Landscaping Company.The Villas were the successful responders to GASSD’s request for proposal for a company to do street cleaning, graffiti and broken glass removal, leaf raking, and some general maintenance, to help GASSD take the business district to a new level of safety and cleanliness and, this season, holiday cheer.Crew uses solar bands as there's no external access to electricity all along Grand Avenue Over the years there have been other crews doing this job since GASSD was organized in 2009, but the Villa family business — five cousins and other relatives operating out of the family home nearby on Peck Street — is the first local business who are also local residents to be doing so. And that has, by the accounts of several long-time neighbors and activists, made a very significant difference in both the quality and consistency of the service provided.“It’s our community. We’re customers in these same stores,” said Armondo, a native of Oaxaca, Mexico, who has lived and raised a family in Fair Haven over the last 27 years. He currently has kids attending the John S. Martinez School on James Street.He and his crew are usually up by 5 a.m. They fortify themselves with hot chocolate or coffee that they buy from one of the nearby Grand Avenue businesses, most frequently the early-morning-open bakeries like La Tapita or Apicella, and their two hours of cleaning rounds, five days a week, begins to roll at 6 a.m. every morning. And, significantly, they often begin in front of the neighborhood’s schools — for a very specific reason, said Gonzalez, who has been the lead manager at GASSD for the last year.“It’s important,” said Gonzalez, who went to the F.A.M.E. school himself 25 years ago when it was known as the Columbus Family Academy, ​“that the kids see that someone is doing something about all this.”Last season's leaves used to accumulate around the school; no longer. By all this he meant the broken glass, litter, cigarette butts, needles, and nips as well as unwanted personal behaviors like drug use, public urination, and vagrancy. To that end an important focus of GASSD is to work with the police, parks and traffic, public works and other city departments and nonprofit agencies to get stuff done more expeditiously.New brighter lights have been installed by the city, said Gonzalez, and a major grant will result in the beginning of a repaving and general redo of the streetscape all along Grand with better transportation infrastructure, including better bus stops and crosswalks and perhaps even a roundabout at Grand and Ferry, a badly congested intersection at the heart of the business district.Gonzalez and city staffers approach people doing drugs or are vagrant in front of local stores and try to connect them with services. Many of these people, Gonzalez was at pains to point out, are not Fair Haveners and may be attracted to the avenue because of its past reputationAnd that reputation or branding of Fair Haven is also slated to change as part of the marketing agenda GASSD is building on the work of the Villa family, whose efforts are changing immediate visual impressions for not only business owners and residents, but also people in transit moving through the district. A special services district is established by law in the city’s ordinances to permit business and property owners in commercial stretches to come together and by a majority vote agree to tax themselves to create revenue. Those funds are used to purchase services that augment what the city is doing to clean, secure, and market the business districts.GASSD is the city’s fourth such district, after the business zones on Whalley Avenue, Chapel West, and the Town Green.On Friday morning as Armondo and Angel were mounting the lights, the three other members of their crew were driving the GASSD’s small Toyota Tacoma truck up and down the avenue in a choreographed double sweep, which they learned from their training shadowing the Town Green’s ​“ambassadors” maintaining the business district downtown.The Villas begin Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday mornings at 6 a.m. at Grand and Ferry and move west. They cover both sides of the street, and first remove only bulk trash and other large items. They drive in this first pass as far as the Mill River District on the avenue, about as far as where Grand begins to curves at Murphy Drive just before the bridge.Then, on the return, the focus becomes picking up the cigarette butts, the nips, needles, any small littered items along the same route. Then they do the same double sweep heading east from Grand and Ferry to the Quinnipiac River Bridge and then back. All told, Gonzalez estimates the crew picks up eight to 12 large 30-gallon bags of trash every morning.El Hibaro is the barbershop where Gonzalez went as a little kid. Its owner, Severino Burgos, is one of the anchoring business men on the board of the GASSD As we were talking in the chill morning air, a mom and her little kid were dropped off from by a black car in front of the school. They weren’t going to F.A.M.E. but to the little daycare directly across the street. Immediately Gonzalez pointed out how the child noticed the light band that Angel Villa had wound around one of the trees and he began to tug on the hem of his mother’s jacket so she might notice.“If you change the environment, the atmosphere, make the place clean and healthy and the kids and parents that drop them off see it,” he said, ​“that sends a strong message for the kids.”Future plans for the GASSD include building on the work of the Villa family with a campaign to be launched in January next year called ​“Grand Haven/Clean Haven/Fair Haven.” It’s going to include pamphlets (currently being created at the Wilbur Cross High School print shop) and signs to be placed in the windows of businesses along the corridor.That will be followed by intensive door knocking on individual residences to emphasize how important it is to maintain this new standard that seems to be evolving, and the kind of cultural change that attends to it.Further on in the year, Gonzalez said, GASSD will be working to market Fair Haven as a destination to experience the culture, cuisine, and styles of the home countries of the increasingly wide range of immigrants — Mexican, Peruvian, Dominican, Guatemalan, and, lately from the countries of the Middle East — who are making Fair Haven their new home.Gonzalez said he also likes the idea of flags of these countries, or pennants representing the countries, hanging from the Grand Avenue’s lamp posts, along with the American flag.Expect the continuing work of the Villa family to be a key part of all this.