ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Welcome to Huntington Beach

What do a city’s sales tax receipts and its freeway landscaping have to do with one another? If Huntington Beach has it right, quite a bit.

City officials believe that their community would be more welcoming if freeway drivers were greeted with Mexican fan palm and jacaranda trees, and oleander and abelia plants instead of the usual run of ice plant, ivy and nondescript trees. It’s certainly worth a try, as long as local merchants foot the bill.

After talking with merchants, the city drew up a plan to re-landscape the southbound Beach Boulevard exit of the San Diego Freeway, the closest exit to the Huntington Center mall. The ambitious plan comes with a “plant palette,” an assortment of selected plantings, and a $464,250 price tag. Even if merchants find financing for some, if not all, of these improvements, they stand to help themselves by beautifying the approach to their city.

The plan came about because merchants were concerned about attracting shoppers away from other Orange County malls. That’s just one more indication of the fierce competition between cities for sales taxes, which have provided a major source of municipal revenue since the passage of tax-cutting Proposition 13 in 1978.

While one may well question a taxing system that pits one city so fiercely against another, every city is wise to try to maximize sales tax receipts. Anything that sets a city apart from its neighbors helps. A few other cities in California, including Santa Ana, Cerritos and Temecula, have tried improving on the landscaping installed by the California Department of Transportation as a way of saying, “We’re special.”

Huntington Beach city officials say that the re-landscaping could be paid for with a tax-assessment district formed by local merchants, or with money generated from the redevelopment agency in which the mall is located.

The city, which places a higher priority on other street-improvement and transportation projects, did the right thing in designing a project and moving it along to the merchants. It’s up to them to run with the ball.