City Heights Leader Lobbies for Safe Corner

José Lopez, president of the Fox Canyon Neighborhood Association in City Heights, started a letter-writing campaign to lobby city-council members to support a grant proposal that would address a problem corner at 50th Street and University Avenue. The association’s proposal includes an additional streetlight, a pedestrian crosswalk, a landscaped median, and a no-parking rule on the south side of University.

“This corner and the one at Winona Avenue have accumulated a great number of vehicle/pedestrian accidents, and two people have been killed while crossing the street,” Lopez wrote in a mass email to encourage community members to take part in the campaign.

Lopez has asked letter-writers to copy him on letters sent by email so he can keep track of how many are sent.

“I have about ten letters that have been sent, but none of them are from our neighborhood,” he says. “We are the ones who are supposed to be saying, ‘This is a bad thing in my neighborhood, so fix it,’ rather than people from Temecula saying, ‘This is a bad thing in your neighborhood, so fix it.’”