YORBA LINDA : Council OKs Higher Landscaping Rates

The City Council this week set a series of new rates that residents and businesses pay for street lighting and landscaping along public streets.

For most of the city’s property owners, the new rates will increase their annual landscaping assessment. However, the annual street lighting assessment was reduced for all property owners.

About 60% of the city’s 20,000 parcels of land are divided into five landscaping districts. The remainder receive no landscaping, and the owners aren’t charged a fee.

The council, voting 4 to 1, with Councilman Daniel T. Welch casting the dissenting vote, increased the landscaping fee by $1.19 to $12.05 a year. The new assessments will range from $18 to $400 a year.

The council also levied a new charge on homeowners in tracts bordering Fairmont Boulevard to fund maintenance of landscaping planned along that street.

The new rates followed two public hearings that drew a total of about 50 residents. While some residents protested the proposed increase, there was strong support for the assessments.

“I am very happy to join the ranks of the assessed to help make Yorba Linda beautiful,” said Gail Lipp, who lives in a tract off Fairmont Boulevard.

Lipp and two of her neighbors said the slopes along Fairmont are unsightly and dangerous.

Diane Steimann said children often scramble up and down the slopes, which are covered with weeds, broken bottles and other trash.

During heavy rains, the lack of landscaping allows dirt and debris to wash down the slope and cover the sidewalk, Steimann and Lipp said.

“I am here to offer my enthusiastic support for this landscaping assessment,” Steimann said.

But Bernard Perry, who lives in the same neighborhood, said that Fairmont Boulevard was not a problem.

“Some of the banks are bad, but we only get rain every few years,” Perry said. “I don’t think Fairmont is too bad.”

The council temporarily set the assessment for the Fairmont Boulevard area at $8 a year.

That amount will increase after the city installs plants and shrubs on slopes bordering the street and in island medians.