From baskets to benches, the nonprofit continues to aid city efforts to clean up.

If you’ve looked up lately and admired the hanging baskets of plants in The Village, you can thank Enhance La Jolla for that. 

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. 

There are at least 100 hanging baskets currently managed by the MAD, Enhance La Jolla President Ed Witt said during the organization’s July 18 board meeting, “thanks to people in the community who have been very generous.”

The donations have enabled Enhance La Jolla to “proceed rather aggressively” with the baskets, Witt said.

Enhance La Jolla will soon refinish benches throughout The Village, he said, and has selected Japhet’s Painting Company to do the work.

Japhet’s Painting Company, run by Japhet Perez, also President of the La Jolla Village Merchants Association, will strip and stain the benches.

“We’re really happy to be able to do that kind of work with a local company,” Witt said.

Enhance La Jolla is also looking into San Diego’s street sweeping schedule, as Witt feels “strongly that our streets are not being swept … like the city says they are.”

The city is supposed to sweep the streets in the MAD every Monday, Witt said, but he’s observed his own street in The Village receiving a cursory sweep the third Thursday every other month, down the middle of the road and around the numerous parked cars.

“I’m a little suspicious,” he said. “It’s a waste of money, a waste of time. They’re really just polluting with the dust that they make and the gas that they’re burning.”

Enhance La Jolla will document street sweepers or their absence and impress upon the city the need for improvement, he said.