Mission Viejo : Public Forum Today Will Look Into Incorporation

With residents of Mission Viejo on notice that by mid-1986 the county will no longer pay the extra tab for street sweeping, road and hillside maintenance, community leaders want to see if there is support for creating a new city in the Saddleback Valley.

As a step in that direction, the Mission Viejo Municipal Advisory Commission has scheduled a a public forum today to discuss incorporation of some or all of the Saddleback Valley. The meeting begins at 1 p.m. at the council office in Miner’s Village, 27021 La Paz Road, Suite 430, located at the corner of Marguerite Parkway and La Paz Road.

“We want to get a feeling from the community itself whether the idea is worth pursuing,” commission chairman Christian Keena said Friday. “It’s open to all the residents and businesses in the Saddleback Valley.”

Last week, the Orange County Board of Supervisors declared that taxpayers in unincorporated areas must bear the full cost of their community services, rather than depend on the county to offset budget deficits.

Since 1978, when revenues to county service areas were cut in half by Proposition 13, the county has helped the 14 administrative and geographic units pay for services such as street sweeping, maintenance of parks, roadside slopes and street medians, traffic signals and even recreational programs.

But since the amount requested by special districts in recent years has exceeded available funds, supervisors voted to give priority to countywide services rather than have north county taxpayers underwrite services in south county communities and vice versa.

“We have no problem in fiscal 1985-86,” Keena said. “But we have a long-range problem to deal with: Should we incorporate or not, and what do we do to finance the special district in the next fiscal year?”

Any community wishing to incorporate is required by state law to do a study to determine whether a new city could support itself.

In a tentative first step toward incorporation, Keena said study groups would be formed to examine the geographic community of interest in the Mission Viejo area, whether there is a sufficient tax base to support a new city and what residents want.

“The last thing we want to do is form a new city that is not financially healthy from the start,” Keena said.