Ben Garbacz/Daily Mining Gazette From left, Jon Luse, Todd Gast and Jonathon Nagel go over upcoming events for the City of Hancock at Monday's meeting of the Downtown Development Authority.

HANCOCK — With Autumn here and winter on the horizon the City of Hancock has some preparations ahead. Upcoming events were reviewed at the Hancock Downtown Development Authority meeting Monday. The city will start work on Hancock Lights the Night beginning Oct. 15. The city campground will be closed for the season and then 23 teams made up of businesses, families and others will create Christmas displays at individual campsites for the upcoming holiday season. The campground will be decorated in order to turn it into a Christmas lights spectacle for visitors and residents alike to walk through. While the teams have displays planned, there are still decorations and lights which will be found throughout the campground, and the city is looking for volunteers to assist in the displays.

“This is a community effort to make this Hancock Lights the Night,” Todd Gast of the DDA said. “So if you are interested in helping out, please spread the word. This is a great team builder for big companies, small companies, church organizations and families that want to get together and do something for the Holidays, like helping us light the night.”

The Hancock Rotary Club is hosting its Hallo-Wine Tasting and silent auction on Oct. 24 at the Finnish American Heritage Center. Entry to the tasting costs $75 per person or $525 for a table of eight. Tickets can be purchased at the Hancock City Hall or from Hancock Rotarians. The tasting will feature Lo Duca Brothers wines, and the event serves as a fundraiser for Hancock Community Projects and Polio Plus.

Make a Difference Day falls on Oct. 25, in which everyone is invited to assist the city clean up its parks and other public spaces in preparation for the changing season. “We really want to put our best foot forward and clean up our town of course before the ‘S’ word comes,” Gast said. “So we’re working with Michigan Tech. We’ve got about 60 students that are going to be coming to help us here in the City of Hancock. If you’d like to be a mentor at one of our parks, we can fit you with that. Or if you’d like to get a group of people and help us out or just simply help out a neighbor is really what we’d like to see on Make a Difference Day.”

Those interested in participating in Make a Difference Day can do so by calling Hancock City Hall. Trick-or-Treating will take place from 5 – 7 p.m. on Halloween.

The city is looking for more volunteers to assist in preparations for events related to Hancock’s designations as the 2026 Finno-Ugric Capital of Culture. Every two weeks a planning committee meets, and extra committees have been formed to cover all preparations for the lineup of events including Heikinpäivä, Juhannus, Parade of Nations and Finnish Independence Day.

Aside from calendared events, City Manager Mary Babcock reported the property on 114 Franklin St. has received an appraisal from Seaton Appraisals for $215,000. “I am hoping to get that on the closing schedule in the next week or so, and I will contact who needs to sign those documents as we get a time and date in place for that,” she said. “Our goal right now will be to store a lot of our downtown accessories in that building for the winter, and then as we move forward, we’ll look at how to use it. We will also sell spots in there for the winter for off street parking.”