Enhance La Jolla is working to keep walkways clear of vendors and numerous signage.

As summer tourists are proliferating on sidewalks throughout The Village, so are illegal vendors and multiple sandwich board signs for local merchants. Enhance La Jolla is working to clear those out.

Enhance La Jolla is a nonprofit established in 2019 by the La Jolla Community Foundation to manage the Maintenance Assessment District, or MAD, for The Village, taking on landscape maintenance, street and sidewalk cleaning, litter and graffiti abatement and additional trash collection.

The city of San Diego has empowered MADs to enhance city services like those mentioned above; Enhance La Jolla is also able to fund and execute projects from adding or upgrading signage to larger initiatives like the forthcoming Village Streetscape.

As sidewalk vendors are pushed away from Scripps Park and The Children’s Pool following recent enforcement, a few have popped up on Prospect Street, Girard Avenue and other Village sidewalks illegally (the city prohibits sidewalk vending within 15 feet of a building’s entrance).

“We’re kind of playing this cat and mouse game with sidewalk vendors,” Enhance La Jolla President Ed Witt said at the organization’s July 18 meeting.

“In the community, we have a lot of responsible business owners paying very large lease payments, and right outside their door is somebody with a table set up,” he said. “That’s just not fair to the people who are paying the taxes and the people who are paying for the storefront.”

Witt urged those who see illegal vendors to report it using the city’s Get It Done app. 

Also clogging some sidewalks are sandwich boards advertising for the merchants.

Businesses are allowed based on city code, one sandwich port adjacent to the store, but some merchants have as many as four boards along a sidewalk, Witt said, or placed a block away from a storefront.

Enhance La Jolla is “not an enforcement agency,” he said, but multiple sandwich boards constitute graffiti – the abatement of which is a MAD-managed service.

Graffiti abatement includes painting, power washing, sticker removal and the elimination of extraneous signage, Witt said.

“We would appreciate it if the Village merchants would cooperate with the city code … to not clutter our sidewalks with needless repetitive signs,” he said.

“I know how important it is to have traffic marketing to get people to come to your store,” Witt said. “And we want these merchants to be successful. But we have to keep the sidewalks clear. it’s a danger [and] it just doesn’t look right.”

Bill Podway, representing the La Jolla Village Merchants Association, said he will notice the merchants to adhere to the rules.

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