Signal Hill Mayor Ellen Ward is asking residents to help clean the city.
BY NICK DIAMANTIDES
Staff Writer
Signal Hill Mayor Ellen Ward is displeased with the sight of litter on the city’s streets, sidewalks and parks, and she is asking community volunteers to help her do something about it. Recently, Ward initiated a quarterly neighborhood cleanup campaign.
“This used to be done in Signal Hill quite a while back,” she said. ‘Then when Obama got elected, he was talking about volunteerism and getting people involved and I thought, ‘We need to do that here.'” She explained that the city already has some volunteer programs, but the cleanup campaign has been on the shelf for too long. “We are going to start doing this on a quarterly basis (once every three months),” she said. “But if there is a lot of support, we may start doing it more often next year.” Currently, she has three cleanup days scheduled: May 30, August 29 and November 21.
“When I was campaigning for reelection and driving around the city, I noticed that litter was really bad on some of our streets, especially on Orange and California Avenues,” she said. “” I knew we needed to do something about it.”
Ward said the May 30 cleanup will not focus on Orange and California, but the hilltop. “I decided that was the best place to start because we can use Discovery Well Park as the place to meet and organize, and two of our residents have been working hard to keep that area clean for quite a few years,” she said. “I thought it was about time they got some help.”
She was referring to Gil Griego and Chan Brainard, who live in the hilltop area. “One of the best things about living in Signal Hill is that people really are concerned about what the city looks like,” Griego said. “Chan and I keep the hilltop clean, but there are other areas that people also need to concentrate on. Our motto has always been sort of a take-off on what JFK said so many years ago: Don’t ask what the city can do for you, but ask what you can do for the city.”
Ward explained that Signal Hill Disposal will supply a large dumpster for the event and the city’s department of public works will supply brooms, bags, shovels, rakes and other tools necessary to do the job. “People are supposed to wear tennis shoes, clothes comfortable to work in and gloves,” Ward said.
The mayor noted that she won’t know how many people will participate until the morning of the event. She added that she has asked several restaurants in the area to donate lunches for all the volunteers. “Let’s face it,” she explained, “a lot of the litter in our city is the bags, wrappers and cups that come from fast-food restaurants.”
Ward said that if enough people participate in the cleanup events, the city’s appearance and the residents’ quality of life will both improve. “A cleaner city is a better city,” she said. “Hopefully these events will also get the message across that people should not litter. I think the people that come to the events will definitely get that message. If you pick it up, you won’t want to throw it down again.”
The mayor added that in the future she will be talking to some of the local schools to possibly arrange community service credits for students who participate.
As part of her effort to make the city cleaner and safer, Ward is also looking into ways to encourage people to keep their dogs on leashes and pick up after them when they take them on walks. “I have city staff investigating things we can do to make those things happen,” she said. “They will come back with a report at one of the upcoming city council meetings.”
Ward has used the city’s cable television station to urge residents to keep dogs on leashes and pick up their droppings, but so far that has not had much of an impact. “It is such a terrible thing for dog owners to not pick up after their pets,” she said. “It seems that people who do not have dogs are the ones who end up stepping in it. It is a very inconsiderate thing for dog owners to do.”
Ward added that failure to keep a dog on a leash is a serious problem too. She explained that unleashed dogs get hit by cars and sometimes attack other people’s dogs. “People think they know their pets, but they don’t,” she said. “That’s why we have leash laws, and people need to obey the laws.”
