Ashcan program and SANDAG bicycle project discussed at Town Council meeting

By Dave Schwab | SDUN Reporter

The Mission Hills Town Council outlined a number of upcoming events and received a progress report on ongoing bicycle network improvements for Uptown at its April 11 meeting. From a spring cleanup and annual garden tour to the summer concert series and Fourth of July Festival, representatives from the Town Council said there were a lot of big events scheduled for the neighborhood.

“The biggest highlight is our April 27 cleanup we’re doing in the neighborhood with I love a Clean San Diego at Meshuggah Shack,” said Town Council President Lara Gates. “The Mission Hills Garden Walk on May 11 is also a big deal, and then there’s the Concerts in the Park series starting the second to last Friday in June.”

The concerts will be every Friday from 6 – 8 p.m. through August, and Gates also highlighted the Fourth of July Festival in Pioneer Park, which includes a parade and barbecue competition.

Volunteers for the Saturday, April 27 cleanup will meet at 9 a.m. on the corner of Goldfinch Street and Fort Stockton Drive to clean streets, sidewalks and open spaces of trash including cigarette butts and single-use plastics like grocery bags, bottle caps and Styrofoam cups.

Natalie Roberts of I Love A Clean San Diego gave a brief presentation on the nonprofit’s Keep America Beautiful ashcan program, a joint effort with the Surfrider Foundation of San Diego to install public ashcans outside bars and restaurants to help mitigate cigarette-butt litter.

Under the program, ashcans with hoods protecting them from rain are typically purchased by community groups or business improvement districts for $200. Areas with containers have experienced a 25 to 85 percent decrease in cigarette-butt litter on those streets, Roberts said.

“A total of 158 ashcans have been installed throughout San Diego County,” she said, adding the goal is to have eight to 10 containers strategically located throughout communities near restaurants and other high-use areas for smoking to deter cigarette litter. “We are expanding them inland into areas like Hillcrest where there are a lot of restaurants, bars and street traffic.”

In addition to the April 27 cleanup, the Town Council also discussed plans for the 15th annual Mission Hills Garden Walk, to be held May 11 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. This year’s theme is “Something for Everyone,” and the 2.5-mile walking tour starts at Mission Hills Nursery and visits 10 gardens.

Every summer, in one of the neighborhood’s most attended traditions, free concerts are offered in Pioneer Park at 1521 Washington Pl. hosted by community organizations and businesses. “We’ve got an absolutely phenomenal lineup of bands this year,” Gates said, thanking County Supervisor Ron Roberts for “contributing the lion’s share of funding necessary to hold the concerts.”

Following the discussion of upcoming events, Beth Robrahn of San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) updated the Town Council on the Uptown Regional Bike Corridor Project. SANDAG is working to create a bicycle network that links city neighborhoods and includes on-street bike facilities from Old Town and Mission Valley through several other Uptown neighborhoods, City Heights and Downtown.

“This is one of several projects that [was] adopted as part of the San Diego Bike Plan,” Robrahn said. “It’s a large project area, about 10 miles, within the Uptown District planning area. We’re in the planning and design phase of this project.”

Robrahn said the objective of creating an interconnected regional bike network is to “make the streets safer for people to ride their bikes,” adding “that’s a huge opportunity to encourage people to bike.”

Regional bike corridor projects like Uptown’s “can be transformative [and] actually improve the feel and vitality of neighborhoods by slowing down cars with traffic calming [measures], making streets safer and improving business,” she said.

Calling Washington Street an important part of the Bike Corridor project area, Robrahn said regional cycling network improvements will “provide a tremendous opportunity to slow traffic down on Washington making it safer, not only for people biking, but for people walking.”

She said details for plans along Washington Street will be available soon, and the project will hopefully be “on the ground” in two years.