ARLINGTON — Six months of planning and coordination served as the capstone for Ryan Guentz’s 13 years in the Boy Scouts, on a project that benefited the local American Legion as well.

Guentz’s grandfather, uncles and father Matt have all served in the military, so when he found out that Arlington American Legion Post 76 was interested in posting the flags of all the branches of service around the veterans memorial monument in Legion Park, he knew he’d found his Eagle Scout project.

Guentz started Scouting in the first grade and is only a few months away from his 18th birthday. He started working on his Eagle Scout project in earnest on Feb. 28, by planning out and designing the placement of the flagpole mounts around the monument.

Matt Guentz explained that son Ryan had to figure out how maintenance crews would mow around the concrete blocks that would serve as the bases for the flagpole mounts, which inspired Ryan to install borders around them. However, each new idea necessitated the next step of planning and design.

“What would he put in the borders?” Matt Guentz said. “How would he keep the flagpole holes from filling up with rainwater? There were many hours of thought before the pen hit the paper. The final design he settled on in June included a drainage system and caps, but the journey was just beginning.”

Ryan Guentz also had to submit his design plans to the city of Arlington and the Boy Scouts, each of which held him to their own demanding standards.

“I had to keep in mind that the project had to complement the memorial and not make it look bad with the addition,” Ryan said. “The city required a certain amount of spacing between the flags, and that the rest of park remain presentable.”

Matt Guentz explained that Ryan also had to solicit financial and material support from businesses and community organizations for the project, which led to a number of dead-ends.

“He got a taste of the salesman’s snow-job,” Matt said. “They’d tell him, ‘Sure, we can do that,’ but several weeks later, he’d get the brush-off.”

Matt credited Ryan with tracking down new leads on the Internet and continuing to make time for face-to-face interviews with the contacts he’d made, even as many of them ended in disappointment and the deadline of his impending 18th birthday approached rapidly.

“He held it together and made one last presentation,” Matt said. “That one came through huge, with a donation of time, material and concept design work by Priceless Granite in Granite Falls. They also set up the engraving on the stone-toppers for each branch of service’s flagpole mount, through Pacific Coast Memorials in Everett.”

Arlington’s Cuz Concrete, Arlington Hardware & Lumber and the Rosen Supply Company also pitched in as donors for the project, which wound up costing slightly more than $400 and using the following:

• 24 bags of Quikrete.

• Two bags of concrete.

• Four sheets of recycled plywood from a donor’s scrap wood pile.

• 64 square feet of bark for the borders.

• Seven 14-inch-square slabs of granite, approximately 1 3/8 inches thick each.

• Seven feet of two-inch PVC pipe for the holes to mount the flagpoles in the blocks.

• Nine 80-pound sacks of pea gravel for the base of the concrete blocks.

• One 50-pound sack of Jet Set cement to bond the granite to the blocks of concrete.

To qualify for Eagle Scout, Ryan had to supervise the labor on his project from a leadership role. He wound up overseeing nearly 20 younger boys, whose need of guidance helped keep him going through the completion of the project on Sept. 3.

“Watching the young boys that I mentored becoming skilled Scouts was worthwhile,” Ryan said. “It took three nights to dig the holes and place the blocks in the ground. The hardest part of it was placing them so that they were lined up in the exact placements they needed to be.”

Matt was concerned with the longevity of his son’s project, because he didn’t want Ryan to spend that much time on an endeavor that might be torn down just a few short years later.

“Some recent previous local projects have shown levels of deterioration,” Matt said. “This needed to be a lasting effort. I was touched when he talked about how good it felt when all the vets thanked him for doing this project.”

Ryan starts his senior year at Arlington High School on Sept. 8 and is already planning on attending the Sno-Isle Tech Skills Center. Matt described his son as a committed and inquisitive Scout who’s already passed on many of his skills to younger Scouts following in his footsteps.

“Ryan has spent years working with the young,” Matt said. “He truly gets it. Show them until they’re confident that they can try it on their own, then guide them from a distance.”