Moorpark Has High Hopes for High Street Plan : Redevelopment: City may add benches, planters and trash receptacles as part of blueprint to rejuvenate downtown.

After years of talk about making High Street a quaint commercial strip in the heart of Moorpark, city officials are poised to add improvements aimed at revitalizing the city’s historic downtown.

The City Council will review plans Wednesday to breathe life into the dusty half-mile strip by installing benches, planters and trash receptacles by early fall--a move city officials hope will help bring downtown Moorpark back to life.

“It’s exciting,” Moorpark Chamber of Commerce President Francis Okyere said of the slated improvements. “It’s been years-- years --since this has been in the works and this is the first positive step. It just exemplifies that the city is finally really doing something to attract business to town.”

Mayor Paul Lawrason said the improvements are part of an ambitious blueprint for the city’s downtown area.

“This will be the first recent enhancement of the downtown area by putting some hardware in there that will make it a more pleasing place to look and and be in,” Lawrason said. “It’ll be a more attractive downtown and I’d like it to eventually become the place to go in the city for specialty items and restaurants.”

Future projects include the installation of ornamental lamp posts along High Street, the development of a small park near the city’s Metrolink station and a larger park on nearby Casey Road. “It’s way overdue,” Councilman Scott Montgomery said.

“When all the amenities are complete, you’ll have a much warmer and more inviting climate for people to go and visit and shop in the old town area,” Montgomery said. “It becomes much more of a destination, a place you go rather than each individual store being a place to go get something and then run away.”

With the opening of the Metrolink commuter rail station on High Street last October, and the recent activation of a city redevelopment agency that had been stalled for years by lawsuits, city officials said they now see a clear path toward downtown revitalization.

Lawrason said the flight of customers and some businesses from downtown Moorpark over the years was a natural progression as development spread increasingly farther from the center of the city.

“You get the strip malls, the shopping centers which draw the customers out of the central part of town,” Lawrason said. “And you wind up with a wasteland in some ways. You really need to refocus, to begin to put elements in that (older) area that are going to begin to draw the customers back.”

Joy Cummings, chairwoman of the Moorpark Old Town Merchants Assn., has repeatedly urged the council to bring planters and benches to High Street in a bid to aid the merchants who have endured tough times.

Cummings said her group had hoped to see a more ambitious revitalization sooner, but will welcome any improvements.

“At least they’re doing something,” Cummings said. “Personally, I don’t think that I will live long enough to ever see decorative street lights or a park on this street.”

But city officials say the rebirth of High Street has already begun, and cite the more than $2 million spent in recent years on street, curb, sidewalk and gutter renovations as evidence.

“The sidewalk was something, the upgrade of the street was something,” Councilman John Wozniak said. “You can have benches and a nice area to come to, but if you have no sidewalk and a bad street, people aren’t going to want to come there.”

Wozniak said the city has entered a new phase of High Street improvement, not the first phase.

“The process started a long time ago and now what you’re seeing are things that people can actually touch and feel,” Wozniak said. “You can see the planters, you can sit on the benches, street lights will go up in the near future. People don’t think of the sidewalk as an upgrade, they think of it as a sidewalk.”