City Grants Will Help to Beautify Valley Area

The city’s Department of Public Works has awarded grants worth a total of $215,887 to groups working on 48 beautification projects in the San Fernando Valley.

Ranging from $600 to $5,000, the grants will help build two new basketball courts at El Oro Way Elementary School in Granada Hills, pay for a mural at Lokrantz Special Education Center in Reseda and install a sprinkler system on Saticoy Street in Van Nuys for the Mid Valley Chamber of Commerce.

The Neighborhood Matching Fund doled out $700,000 citywide this year, twice as much as it awarded in 1998. The program, which offers workshops to teach people how to write grant proposals, aids community groups that want to spruce up their surroundings but lack the money to do so.

In Van Nuys, for example, the Mid Valley Chamber had planted some foliage along a drab median on Saticoy Street. But the group had to rely on volunteers to keep the plants from wilting.

“Right now, the volunteers drive up with buckets and buckets of water for the plants,” said Nancy Hoffman, the chamber’s chief executive officer. The new sprinklers should put an end to such labors.

Hoffman said the city funding, which will also pay for a gravel sidewalk on Woodman Avenue, allows her organization to tend to small projects that would otherwise go undone.

“The chamber doesn’t have the money to do things like this,” she said. “We ask our members for money all the time. But when we get a grant, then we’re able to pick up money along the way when people see we have a starting point.”