Keep Temple Beautiful wants to clean up the city’s medians, making the area more attractive to residents and visitors.

The organization became engaged in a multi-year effort a year or two ago to improve medians along Canyon Creek Road and Fifth Street.

The Canyon Creek Road section, which now has irrigation, is ready for planting and the organization is planning a community event just for that.

Keep Temple Beautiful will hold a planting effort Oct. 25, which is also Make a Difference Day in the city.

Thomas Baird, board chairman of Keep Temple Beautiful, said the project will be possible with a lot of volunteer labor, donated funding and help from businesses.

“We’ve gone to all the landowners up and down and virtually all the landowners have contributed,” he said of the Canyon Creek project.

He said the organization is expecting between 75 and 100 volunteers on Make a Difference Day to help with the planting and setting of decorative boulders.

Baird said that with the length of the medians, Keep Temple Beautiful will improve the first 100 feet or so of medians at each intersection, or end cap, of Canyon Creek from 31st Street to Fifth Street. The group will fill in the middle sections at a later time, he said.

According to Baird, the organization aims to improve medians along key areas in the city to make it more pleasant to residents as well as those coming to town looking for places to settle.

“Basically, years ago we noticed a number of medians in Temple, primarily on Canyon Creek, Fifth Street and areas of west Temple, that were growing up with weeds and grass,” he said. “It turns out they had no irrigation and no landscaping, just medians in the middle of the road growing wild.”

He said the lack of attention could have a negative effect in attracting new residents to the city.

“We looked at other cities and how they are attracting retirees, business people - people who bring in new jobs,” he said.

He said the organization sat down with city officials and others in the community to brainstorm ideas for improving the medians. The result was a plan in which the city agreed to install irrigation in Canyon Creek and Fifth Street medians over a two-year period.

Baird said showing visitors the city cares about it appearance will help encourage newcomers to stay.

“When people care about the community and make it look nice, others say this is a nice city and a clean city and I’d like to live in it,” he said.