I like the contest idea.
Getting back to the original question: If I understand that right, you want to have a nice looking sunset and a fore- / middlground that is more than a silhouette. I assume, this scene has a higher dynamic range than you can capture with one picture. You might take a tripod and do some shots where you expose one for the foreground and one for the sunset (and probably some more in between) and use a HDR program to combine the pictures...
The result might look like that: