Corners around town are filled with trash, which is not being picked up by the City.
Corners of the Pacific Palisades commercial areas are littered with trash. Main and side streets of the town have become a site of advertising for contractors.
Jeff Ridgway, who manages an apartment building on Haverford, and has lived in the town during and after the fire wrote CTN that “we need L.A. City sanitation crews dedicated to the Palisades.”
There is debris along the sidewalks near the condos, apartments and townhomes of the buildings still standing. As people come back and remediation is being done, items are thrown on the side of the street.
Additionally, with the clean up crews and other workers in town, trash is going into the trash cans, which are not being picked up. Some corners are overflowing with garbage, which encourages vermin.
Put simply: no one is picking up the trash.
A resident wrote: “Contractors are leaving trash all over the place.” That resident noted that it is not the Army Corps of Engineers, because “I watch them carefully every day. This is from all the private contractors hired for debris removal and whomever gets in our community and has an opportunity to put up signs.”
The resident said that one vendor had more than 30 signs in less than a two-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard. “It’s ridiculous and unacceptable.”
Councilmember Traci Park’s office has been notified about the need for trash removal. Palisades Field Deputy Arus Grigoryan has been using CD11’s beautification team to help clear the trash cans.
Why hasn’t the City of Los Angeles picked up trash in Pacific Palisades? It dates back almost 10 years.
The town was not receiving timely trash pick up in the commercial area and in 2015, at least 51 percent of the commercial property owners in the main Pacific Palisades business district voted to pay a yearly assessment that could be used for tree trimming, street cleaning, sidewalk washing and garbage/trash pickup – things businesses were told that the City of Los Angeles could no longer afford to do.
A Business Improvement District (BID) was formed in 2016 for a term of five years (renewed in 2021). An annual assessment was collected by the City and each property owner pays a certain percentage, based on the square footage of the building, lot size and street frontage.
Additionally, the City received a percentage of the assessment revenue, usually from one to three percent and capped at five percent.
With the money collected from local businesses, Chrysalis was hired to do cleanup and kept trash containers empty, gutters swept, and sidewalks clean of litter and signs.
After the Palisades Fire, the majority of the businesses paying the assessment were out of business: the BID is on hold.
Additionally, since there is no one patrolling the streets and homes are gone, contractors and other vendors have put up signs along Sunset and on residential streets.
A resident wrote, “I just cleared the main artery of the Palisades from Sunset and PCH to the Riviera. It was about 500 signs. The only signs remaining are the support center and a few of the Palisades residents’ signs,” the resident said, and noted it took three hours to clear.
The City of Los Angeles is responsible for trash pickup, and it should be done before rats, and other vermin take over the Palisades.
As one resident wrote, “We may be burned out, but we have pride and all these signs littering the side of the street are unacceptable.”
Contractor and other vendor signs are lining streets and major thoroughfares in Pacific Palisades.
I know the city has money issues but also curious why street cleaning pre and post fire goes in in other residential neighborhoods. For example we are renting mid city and there is residential street cleaning every two weeks. How did the city determine one neighborhood was more important than another to receive this service?
But, could we please have LOCAL vendors’ signs stay up with the permission of the home owner(s) on whatever blocks they appear ? Our local businesses are having it even tougher than the rest of us. Perhaps if the outside vendors wish to advertise, we can ‘donate’ a vendors’ corner where they may put one sign and only there? In that way, residents can see ‘outside’ availabilities and our home-grown business people can try to keep their businesses afloat even against the odds. That may be the only thing we can do to help them but at least it’s something!
The Palisades has been infested with Rats for years.I moved here from NYC 55 years ago.
I never saw a rat in New York. Every house we moved to in the Palisades had rats. Check out the story in the New York Times about the two sisters in the alphabet streets who fed the rats.
Thank You to the resident who removed the 500 signs on Sunset. The adjacent streets are also filled with signs, often on private property. I cleared about 15 signs from the top of El Medio down to Sunset, all of which were on private property.