Committee Revives Santa Clarita Valley’s Cityhood Quest

The fast-growing Santa Clarita Valley, where the natives have been restless for more than 20 years, is making another try at staking out a political identity, this time by gathering its scattered communities under the umbrella of a new city.

A committee has been formed to bring together Newhall, Valencia, Canyon Country, Saugus and Castaic into a sprawling city that would be named Santa Clarita, it was announced Monday. Committee members said they will begin a drive Nov. 1 to get the 12,000 local voters’ signatures needed to put the question of cityhood before the county Local Agency Formation Commission.

As a small part of the 5th Supervisorial District, the area and its residents have little clout with a government situated 50 miles away from some of them, committee members said.

“We’re the most rapidly growing part of the county, but we have very little voice in the decisions taken,” committee spokeswoman Connie Worden said. “As a city of 100,000, we’d have a lot more influence,” said Worden, a veteran of past efforts to put the area on a stronger political footing.

The cityhood committee was formed by the Canyon Country and Santa Clarita Valley chambers of commerce.

Since 1962, there have been three attempts to form a city in the Santa Clarita Valley and two attempts at seceding from Los Angeles County altogether and forming a new county. All failed, for varied reasons.

Best known to many Los Angeles residents as the home of the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park, the Santa Clarita Valley is situated north of the San Fernando Valley. It is a mixture of steep, brush-covered slopes and small towns, old ranches, historic gold mines and new housing developments, increasingly populated by suburbanites fleeing more densely populated communities to the south.

The proposed city would cover 95 square miles, the second largest city area in the county, and would have a population of 100,000, making it the eighth most populous, Louis Garasi, co-chairman of the committee, said. According to the California Department of Finance, based on 1984 figures, such a city would be the seventh largest in the county.

But the area is growing rapidly, committee members said.

There are requests for building permits for 52,000 housing units “in the pipeline,” Worden said. If all were granted--70% is the current average--and each unit were inhabited by the 3.5 persons that is average for newly constructed housing, the proposed city’s population would reach 275,000 within 10 to 15 years. That would make it the third most populous city in the county, behind Los Angeles and Long Beach, Garasi said.

The proposed city covers an area slightly more than half as large as the separate county that Santa Clarita Valley groups proposed in 1978. Although the Valley’s voters supported the ballot measure, it failed to win approval elsewhere in the county. The same thing happened to a secession movement in 1976.

Unlike the county-forming process, creation of a city does not require approval of voters outside the proposed city. A new city also does not have to assume many of the responsibilities that a separate county would, such as court and welfare systems, Garasi noted. “It’s just much easier all the way around to form a city than a county,” Garasi said.

Once the committee begins circulating petitions, it has six months to gather the signatures of 25% of the voters in the proposed city’s area to put the matter before the Local Agency Formation Commission. The commission then rules on whether there is an economic base to support a city government. If the commission approves, the matter goes before the voters at the next election.

“We’re shooting for November of 1986,” Garasi said.

An attempt to form a city in 1979 made little progress because “people were tired after the failure of the county proposal in 1978,” Garasi said. Another attempt was begun in 1981, but bogged down, and no petitions were circulated, he said.