Business View Magazine | February 2020

171 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2020 buckets because the water would come right through into their offices. And so, we were trying to figure out how to do that when we were approached by City Ventures, and some of our brighter minds here put two and two together and thought, maybe there’s a way we can swap properties. We’ll take that old, vacant commercial office building and retrofit it into a new city hall, and then we can trade the old city hall property, at a profit to the City to help pay for the renovation, to City Ventures and then they can actually build a larger project - 70-plus units where city hall used to be. “So, that’s a project that started in 2014-15, and we just finished about a year-and-a-half ago. It included the new city hall, the exterior renovation of our police department, and the expansion and renovation of our community center. Those three buildings sit on three of the four corners in the heart of downtown La Habra, at the La Habra Blvd./Euclid St. intersection. That project also included the renovation of a WPA-era veteran’s hall. Now that developer has sold some of the units and they’re near completion on the rest of them, so it’s done a lot to get development going in downtown La Habra and it’s that type of public/private partnership that everybody talks about. We actually did it here in La Habra.” Going forward, the city would eventually like to create a multi-block downtown district along La Habra Blvd., bounded by Cypress St. to the east and Walnut St. to the west. “The General Plan envisions in that district, mixed-use development,” Ferrier adds. “The community and the city council asked us to look for incentives to provide the development community to re- energize the corridor and so, the incentive was to create development capacity along La Habra Blvd., which is currently built out with single- tenant, commercial retail. But if a developer or investor could assemble two to three properties, the General Plan allows for them to develop a more intensive, mixed-use development, where you would keep the retail on the ground LA HABRA , CAL I FORNI A