Episode 8 - Clean Laguna: Preparing Laguna Beach for Summer with Councilmember Sue Kempf

Mayor Mark Orgill sits down with Sue Kempf for a quick conversation about the City’s Clean Laguna campaign and the community wide effort to keep Laguna Beach clean, safe, and welcoming heading into the busy summer season. In this episode, Councilmember Kempf discusses the goals of the campaign, including reducing litter, improving beach and downtown cleanliness, encouraging responsible visitor behavior, and strengthening community pride through education and outreach. The discussion also highlights how residents, businesses, and visitors can all play a role in protecting Laguna Beach’s coastline, neighborhoods, parks, and public spaces during the peak summer months. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome, Laguna Beach. We're here going to talk about summer surge today and talk to uh Councilmember Sue Kemp regarding the uh Clean Laguna campaign that she's been working on. We're just going to uh she's going to share some of the information about how the program works, what it's in what it is included in it. Uh so can you just tell us a little something about it, Sue, about the program?

SPEAKER_01 0:24

So it's a citywide program, and we'll be launching in late May. And what the community will see when you come into town, both all three of our entrances, you'll see banners that basically say, you know, please pick up your trash. You'll see trash cans around town with mess wrapped in messaging, make people more aware that where the trash cans are and get people to focus on those when they come to the beach and come to some of our beach adjacent areas of town. And then we'll have a lot of social media engagement with people saying, You're welcome to come here, but you have to pack your trash and take it home with you, or else put it in one of our trash bins.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

Where'd the idea originate? How'd you come up with it? I mean, I know you've been working on the surge program, which is a lot of enforcement, right? So the various city departments are uh public works and as far as dealing with the excessive trash and making sure that there's additional trash pickups in the containers and things of that nature. But now obviously you've extended it to more of an education component. So where but how'd you come up with that idea?

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Well, for one thing, we want it to fit in with our stewardship program, and one of our important pillars of our stewardship program is environment. And one of the biggest hazards to our environment is trash. It's on the beaches, it's on our streets, it's in our residential areas. And of course, a lot of that winds up in the ocean. So I remember when I was growing up, there was a program called Make America Beautiful, and it was, I think it started in the 50s, but it was really pushed by Lady Bird Johnson when Lyndon B. Johnson was president. And I remember seeing these signs across the across the country, these signs on the freeway basically telling people, you know, don't throw your trash out the window. Keep America beautiful. And it really worked. People stopped doing that. It was kind of an educational thing. So that's the idea kind of the general idea behind it. A lot of cities are working on this problem. It's a vexing problem for a lot of cities that get a lot of visitors. In particular, like if you go to Japan, Japan's very clean, and that the reason for that is they start very young with kids cleaning up after themselves in school. They have to clean up their classroom, they have to clean up the hallway before they leave, and so people are more cognizant of you know making sure that they put trash where it belongs. And we can pick up trash all day long, which is what we're going to do three times a day as part of our surge for the summer. But the other piece of that was we need to educate people, basically, and make them aware that this is a precious place. It's the beaches here are beautiful, the town's beautiful, but don't leave your trash behind.

SPEAKER_00 2:50

Right. So I know you've mentioned in the past that there's a partnership component. I I guess you're partnering with the retailers. How does that work?

SPEAKER_01 2:59

So we're going to talk to all the retailers in town. We have a sticker that says member of the clean of the clean laguna, and we're going to just ask them to put this sticker in their window. In return for that, we ask them to just sweep in front of their storefront or their business in the morning when they come in and at night before they leave, which includes the curb. So each everybody takes you know accountability and stewardship of their own parcel so that we can have you know a nice clean town all the time. It's really hard for public works to get everywhere and pick up after everybody because a lot of visitors come and we don't have enough people to do that. So we all kind of need to pitch in. So we'll be working with the businesses and through the chamber to some extent.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Yeah. Let's talk briefly about it. It's not directly related with the campaign, but we have enforcement, right? And then I also mentioned we have public works, and they're going to be doing some additional efforts to just, you know, maintain the beaches and deal with the crowds. And we do anticipate large crowds this summer, right? That's right. And uh I think it's going to be a record-breaking year, unfortunately. And I think we're really going to be challenged. Um let's talk about enforcement. Uh, in your mind, where where are we with the city and its uh their ability to enforce and what how they're upping their game?

SPEAKER_01 4:13

Yeah, so I think we're gonna see some additional enforcement work this summer. For example, I think you're gonna see some pop-ups from the police department on some of the beaches. We'll probably have some various checkpoints. We're gonna be, I don't know if we're gonna offsh offset some of the park rangers and move their hours around to where it it's more impactful, they're more impactful because you know the visitors take a while to get here. You'll s start to see a lot of visitors on a nice day, like a one o'clock in the afternoon, and they stay for quite a while. So we want to try to be as concentrate on enforcement during those periods. Um and they'll be do writing a lot of tickets. They've written a lot of pro parking tickets so far this year. People don't realize that. And then we ask the police department every month to put out their stats in terms of what um violations they've cited people for, what categories, whether it's trash, whether it's drinking on the beach, smoking, loud music, um, loud vehicle noise. We'll be putting out the stats for that every month so that people know that we're doing enforcement. Because it's kind of hard to tell what police department's doing if we don't put out numbers.

SPEAKER_00 5:17

So from time to time we all all council members get texts, right, with the community members reminding us uh, you know, whether they see an issue or not, full trash cans or trash on the beach. And I know that we have this Ask Laguna feature.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:32

Can you talk a bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Right. So if you see something like you see a trash can full or somebody's dumped something, you know, like a bed mattress or a piece of furniture or something where it doesn't belong. I I use Ask Laguna all the time. I don't get any more treat special treatment on Ask Laguna than anybody else. I pull up the app, I have it on my phone, I often take a picture. The app has GPS functionality on it so it knows where you're standing. So I'll just fill out my little app and I'll say it's a trash issue, take a picture, please pick this up, describe it just a little bit, and then send it. And then they come out and they notify you right away when they've taken care of the problem.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

And you've mentioned in the past that the response time has been pretty good.

SPEAKER_01 6:14

It's good and public works appreciates it because they can't, as I said before, they can't be everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 6:18

Right.

SPEAKER_01 6:19

And they want to do a good job too. And so we sometimes we just need to help them with that. So if the community pitches in, it's kind of like a force multiplier, if you will, for public works.

SPEAKER_00 6:29

What other suggestions do you have for the community, uh, ways they can help out this summer?

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Well, so a lot of people do pick up trash. I know I do almost every single day.

SPEAKER_00 6:37

Yeah, you have a reputation for it, walking around picking up trash.

SPEAKER_01 6:41

I like doing it because I feel productive, it gives me time to be out in the community, and you know, it also helps me tell public works that they need to uh spend some additional time. But what what people can do is, like, for example, I was at Board and Brew today having lunch and they're they're sponsoring beach cleanups. So I want to get a lot of these businesses sponsoring beach cleanups. And then a lot of the um, you know, different organizations around town, do they would they want to pitch in for a day and maybe they can promote that through their own social media or through their you know network of emails from from their um members to help to help pick up too. Because it's we all kind of need to pitch in. And I think also when people see other people picking up, whether they're consciously aware of it or not, they might think in the you know, pulled in the back of their mind, oh, they don't like trash around here. I've got to remember pick up my trash. I don't want her to have pick up my trash. So I'm hoping that we just set a good example for people in turn in in addition to all the social media and the signage and stuff that we're doing.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Will there be a platform or a place to go for people to check in and monitor uh whether it be scheduled beach cleanup days or just uh various uh the performance of the program where they can just track it?

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Is there a well we'll put that on social media and also I'm going to be talking to people who are participating in the program and I'm happy to give them some social media coverage, especially some of the businesses in town that need some help maybe with additional promotions. As long as they're part of Clean Laguna, we're happy to include them and hopefully get a good reel of people participating, whether it's a you know civic group or it's a business or it's just individuals on their own.

SPEAKER_00 8:15

Right. Well, like I said, it's going to be a busy summer, so we're all gonna have to get through it together. So thanks for tuning in, everybody, and uh we'll see you next time.