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AGOURA HILLS : City Hires PR Firm to Lure Businesses

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The city of Agoura Hills has hired a public relations firm to help develop a strategy to lure new businesses as a way to increase the tax base, city officials said.

The firm will help market Agoura Hills to “businesses which appreciate this city’s efforts to preserve its mountain views and the other qualities that make this community special,” said City Councilman Ed Corridori.

Mustang Marketing, which has an office in Agoura Hills, will be paid $21,000 for the project, which is expected to take about two months, city officials said. The company was chosen from half a dozen applicants.

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Corridori, also chairman of the city’s economic development committee, said the firm will produce a brochure and pocket portfolio that will “highlight positives of the community, including its geographic attributes and Agoura Hills’ fairly young, educated and affluent population of 21,000.”

The move comes as the city battles a nagging perception that it is anti-business. But city officials say the firm was hired strictly to help launch the marketing campaign.

Critics say the city historically has discouraged businesses from locating in Agoura Hills. The city lost a golden opportunity when Price Club abandoned its efforts to locate a store in the city and took its proposal to Westlake Village instead, officials say. The store, they say, would have brought in about $1 million each year in sales tax revenues.

The city is currently embroiled in a legal battle with 12 businesses that sued the city over the right to keep their freeway signs, which the city outlawed in 1985. Voters twice overwhelmingly backed the ordinance banning the signs.

City officials say that if they are strict about enforcing ordinances, it’s only to preserve the city’s quality of life. Corridori said the city’s reputation for strictness may ultimately help attract businesses that share its philosophy.

“Agoura Hills has accomplished a great deal through careful planning and progressive leadership,” said Madeline Murphy, Mustang Marketing’s director of marketing and public relations. She added that the marketing campaign will “build on what has been done to make Agoura Hills a prime business location.”

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Mustang Marketing, which was founded in 1985, has done work for various government entities, including Ventura County, the city of Ventura, the Port of Hueneme, the Greater Oxnard Economic Development Corp. and the Burbank Redevelopment Agency, company officials said.

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