City Beautification
“Local Voters Deserve Details, Not Short Sentences or Vague Goals”
City Beautification:
Issue: Compared to neighboring cities, Laguna Hills isn’t known for its landscaping or general upkeep
Neel’s Goal: Create great first impressions for prospective residents and visitors while creating long term pride among existing residents.
Short-Term Goals:
- Painting Utility Boxes & Trail Underpasses: Create a scholarship program for local, artistically gifted students to paint utility boxes and trail underpasses.
- Replace Aging Park Entry Signs: Durable stone monuments will match our existing city entryway monument signs with added solar-powered lighting at night.
- Redesign and Replace Illuminated Street Signs throughout the City with newer LED signs to enhance the city’s image.
- Light Up the LH Sign on the Hill: The sign can be lit up at night to match Laguna Hills High School colors during sporting events or lit up in thematic colors for holidays such as Fourth of July.
Within 4-Year Goals:
- Landscape Hillside Slopes Along Alicia, Paseo De Valencia, & Ridge Route: Requiring private maintenance standards and creating city funded landscape easements along these major roadways will help elevate quality of life and property values in some of our city’s oldest neighborhoods.
- Note: Landscape easements already exist for slopes in other areas of Laguna Hills and many communities in Southern California already require a degree of landscaping and slope maintenance standards. Let’s work towards uniformity on community aesthetics.
- Public Art: Install sculptures at major intersections in the city using art fees on large new developments in Laguna Hills.
- Note: Laguna Hills already requires art fees on developments in the Urban Village Specific Plan area of the city. Let’s follow the lead of other Orange County cities in requiring art fees on developments in any part of the community.
- Lowering City Landscaping Costs: Plants and trees can be expensive. Currently our city isn’t home to any garden center or nursery. Let’s update our zoning code to allow a nursery to setup shop under the power lines off Indian Hill Lane (between Laguna Hills Drive and Moulton Parkway). If the city can negotiate lower costs for plants and trees due to creation of new space for a nursery business, we can better finance increased landscaping around the community. Furthermore, sales taxes from an additional business in the city are an added benefit to defray costs of better landscaping.
