LA CRESCENTA : Officials Seek More Input on Median

Glendale city officials will seek more public input about a hotly contested proposal to install a concrete median in the middle of Foothill Boulevard in La Crescenta in an effort to gauge whether the project should be abandoned.

The Glendale City Council, which ultimately will decide whether the median is built, will hold a community meeting to discuss the project at 7 p.m. Monday.

The meeting follows a similar event three months ago in which many merchants in the affected area, a mishmash of retail shops and other businesses, complained that the median would make traffic worse on the thoroughfare and make it more difficult for customers to reach their stores.

Jano Baghdanian, the city’s traffic administrator, said the purpose of the median, which would stretch from Lowell Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue, is to improve safety and traffic. The median will be landscaped and “help create an identity” for the area, he said.

“Once you put in a raised median, obviously the left turns are restricted, so some of the business owners were very concerned about that,” Baghdanian said. “But we also have received letters from the residents supporting the project because of the aesthetics.”

The median has been designed to minimize the effect on access to area businesses, with all street intersections remaining open and breaks in the median for businesses that are either large traffic generators or that draw a lot of passersby, Baghdanian said.

Caltrans has approved a state grant to help the city pay the $200,000 cost of constructing the median. The City Council is expected to vote on the project within the next month, officials said.