Apartment Manager Makes Plea to City Council for Lighting on Troubled Street

Two toddlers play on the dark sidewalk of an unlit road. The children are illuminated only by the stray beams of oncoming headlights. Next to them, a group of men are huddled together on the corner of the street, eyeing each car that turns on to their stretch of the road.

Don Hornby, the manager of Riverpointe Park Apartments on the corner of West La Loma Drive and Folsom Boulevard, knows how dangerous this portion of his street can be. Hornby is looking to the Rancho Cordova City Council to help his efforts in cleaning up West La Loma Drive by installing street lights along the first block of the street.

Beyond the first block of West La Loma Drive from Folsom Boulevard, the street is well lit and has at least one street light per block. The first block of West La Loma Drive sits in darkness near the main intersection, as does the side street Terra Loma Drive. Both are heavily travelled by pedestrians from the apartment complexes that line West La Loma Drive.

“I urge you to go down there and walk down that street by yourselves one night,” Hornby said to the City Council on May 4 during his plea for lighting in his neighborhood. “It’s really, really not a safe place.” 

So far, his efforts to gain attention for his street have not seen results.

“I think I’m just going to have to keep going back to City Council,” Hornby said, “and next time I’m going to bring numbers.” The numbers Hornby is referring to are crime statistics for his area. According to the Sacramento County Sheriff, 19 crime reports have been filed for the West La Loma Drive and Folsom Boulevard area in the last 60 days alone.

“West La Loma is a very bad area,” Hornby said to the City Council. “Let’s face it: Where there’s lights, bad people don’t do bad things.”

Over the past two years Hornby and his employer, Matsui Management Corp., have made serious efforts to renovate Riverpointe Park Apartments to try to clean up the area.

“Mr. Matsui has, his own money, put $500,000 out to better Riverpointe Park Apartments,” Hornby said. “We’ve done unbelievable amounts of change to try to bring up that area.” Along with remodeling the complex itself, Hornby hired private security and added lighting in the parking lot area to help his residents feel safer.

“You’re going to see an onslaught of children all playing inside the apartment complex,” he said. “At night here, it’s very well lit inside the complex. I put… somewhere around $16,000 with the exterior lights.”

Outside the complex, however, is a different story. Hornby put lights on the trees outside his complex to try to illuminate the sidewalk at night, but his small lights don’t reach far past his complex. “It’s the best I could do,” he said. “Let’s face it, there’s a lot of people in the area that are on foot here. In the wintertime when I leave out of here, it’s so dark”.

Hornby is not a resident of the apartment complex or neighborhood he is fighting for. He commutes to his job at the apartments from Rocklin, a fact he feels makes his fight for safety on the street more meaningful. “That’s why I put it in the council meeting the way I did – that it’s not for me,” he said. “It’s for everybody else. Nobody else has the abilities nor the capabilities to go down there. They’re just not up for the public forum.”

Making a plea to City Council for street lights is not the only thing he has done for his community. Hornby has recently taken more drastic measures to make his complex and the street around it safer.

“I’ve just installed security cameras,” he said to the City Council. “Some of the cameras that I have currently are also monitoring the street to try to cut the drug dealing that’s actually going on around there.” Hornby’s ultimate goal is to use his cameras to work with the Rancho Cordova Police Department and try to cut the crime rate around his complex.

For now, Hornby will continue to do his part to help his residents feel safe in the troubled neighborhood they call home. He will replace the bulbs on his small tree lights along the edge of his property and continue to record the events beyond his well-manicured, gated community. He will keep his concern focused on his residents and their children, most of whom he feels obligated to represent to those who have the capacity to help. “We have to look out for the tenants’ needs and the people that we do have here,” he said.

He is still waiting for someone who can help to take notice or, more importantly, care. So far, he has been ignored.

“I don’t know if it’s purposely or not,” he said. He still plans on continuing his struggle with trying to get through to someone.

“Just as long as other people will know what kind of situation we have, that’s what I want.”

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Posted by Anne Lowe on May 15 2009. Filed under Viewpoints. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.