Fourth Try : Santa Clarita Cityhood: Bid to Save Values of Old West

The city of Santa Clarita, if it ever comes to be, would sprinkle a population the size of Pomona’s over an area equal to sprawling Sacramento.

The city, now just a gleam in the eye of an organizing committee, would cover 92 square miles just north of the San Fernando Valley and contain 102,000 people, uncounted horses, mountain ranges, working ranches, producing oil fields, a rapidly expanding number of suburban houses, a giant amusement park, three colleges and a herd of buffalo.

Among the things it would not have are its own police department, fire department and school system.

What supporters hope cityhood would gain is the area’s control of its own affairs.

Old West Values

What they hope to retain is a sense of regional identity, a feeling for the values of the Old West even as suburbia gobbles up its gulches.

Santa Clarita is the proposed name for a city that would unite most of the scattered population centers of the Santa Clarita Valley--the now-unincorporated communities of Canyon Country, Castaic, Newhall, Saugus and Valencia.

A City Feasibility Committee last week announced the start of a drive to create the city, the latest in a series of moves by Santa Clarita Valley residents to stake out a political identity of their own.

Since 1962, there have been three efforts to form a city within the Santa Clarita Valley; all died in the planning stage. Two attempts to secede from Los Angeles County and form a separate county were killed by voters elsewhere in the county, who would not approve the breakaway.

Target Date in 1986

The goal of the nine-member feasibility committee, formed by the Canyon Country and Santa Clarita Valley chambers of commerce, is to submit the cityhood proposal to the voters of the affected area in the November, 1986, election. If voters approve, the city of Santa Clarita will be born.

Santa Clarita, as now proposed, would be the second largest city in the county in terms of square miles, trailing only Los Angeles, according to Louis Garasi, co-chairman of the committee and president of a Valencia plumbing manufacturing firm. It would be larger than Seattle, which is 84 square miles, and in the same league with Omaha, at 91, and Milwaukee, which has 96. Sacramento is 96.5 square miles.

The population of the area is about 102,000, which would make it the seventh most populous in the county--smaller than Pomona, with 104,000 people, and slightly larger than Inglewood, at 98,500. The population density averages 1,108 people per square mile, with many inhabitants clustered into small canyon communities that are separated from one another by a series of high mountain ridges.

One of the reasons for choosing the name Santa Clarita was to avoid offending voters by trying to attach the name of one community to the whole area, according to cityhood boosters.

“Some people wanted their community names to prevail,” committee member Connie Worden said. “But after some disagreement and some soul-searching, we decided on Santa Clarita as a somewhat neutral choice.

“Of course, residents will go on using the names of their local communities, as distinct areas within the city, the way people from Los Angeles use local names like Tarzana and Van Nuys. We will have to be persuasive that people will not lose their local identities, but will have more identity as the residents of a city than just being residents of the great big Los Angeles County.”

Police, Fire Service

The city hall probably would be in “the least expensive storefront, as centrally located as possible,” probably in a shopping center at Bouquet Canyon and Soledad Canyon roads “where Valencia meets Saugus,” Worden said.

The city would not have a police or fire department, committee members said. Like many other small- and medium-sized cities in Los Angeles County, it would hire the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s and Fire departments to provide protection, which the departments now supply to the area as a county responsibility.

Estimating the cost of their services is a complicated process that takes months and often includes lengthy negotiations between city and county governments, according to spokesmen for the county departments.

The sheriff’s office, which supplies local policing to 30 contract cities, would work out a budget for minimum coverage, a spokesman said, and then would negotiate with the city for additional things city authorities want--”deputies with special jobs like community relations, more patrol cars, a helicopter, maybe.”

Both departments said they would have to make allowances in their budgets for the long distances between the scattered clusters of dwellings in the proposed city. The Sheriff’s Department, for example, would have to consider the distances in figuring how many patrol cars are needed, because deputies need other units close enough to back them up if they get into serious trouble.

No new school system would be needed, the cityhood committee said, because the area is already served by five school districts--four for elementary schools and one for junior and senior high schools--with their own independently elected officials and tax bases.

The city area has three colleges--College of the Canyons, a publicly supported junior college in Valencia; California Institute of the Arts, a private arts college, and Masters College in Newhall, formerly Los Angeles Baptist College.

New property taxes are not a concern, they said, because of the limits of Proposition 13. A city would take over some of the tax revenues that now go to the county and use them for the services the county would provide, Garasi said.

No Organized Opposition

There has been no organized opposition to the cityhood plan, but the campaign has just begun. A meeting is scheduled Monday night at Sierra Vista Junior High School in Canyon Country.

The Newhall Signal, the only daily newspaper in the proposed city’s area, has taken no stand on the plan, said editor Scott Newhall, who is known for his fire-breathing editorials. Newhall’s great-grandfather, Henry Mayo Newhall, founded Newhall.

However, Newhall, whose newspaper favored the 1978 secession effort, said similar campaigns “haven’t been very successful in the past.”

“I think there’s a certain amount of lethargy locally. People take a look at what the City Council of Los Angeles is like and they probably don’t want the same thing here.”

Fear of New Taxes

There is some worry over a new level of government imposing new taxes.

“The only financial liability might be a tax increase,” said Tom Lee, president of Newhall Land and Farming Co., which owns 37,000 acres of the Santa Clarita Valley. The company has taken no stand on the cityhood proposal, he said, but taxes “are a concern of ours.”

Of the Newhall company’s land, 10,000 acres is in a planned community it is developing in Valencia. About 18,000 people live there now, Lee said, but the company plans to increase that to 60,000, an example of the large-scale growth cityhood proponents say has made the Santa Clarita area the fastest-growing in the county.

Only a city government will give residents the kind of control they need to have a voice in determining how that growth will affect them, the cityhood committee maintains. But members are defensive about being branded “anti-growth,” saying their goal is to control growth, not prevent it.

“We expect to get some opposition from the developers, on the grounds that the devil they know is better than the one they don’t,” Worden said. “We don’t want to eradicate building, but we want a little more say-so in where things go.”

Applications on file with county authorities to build more than 52,000 housing units in the proposed city’s area in the next 15 years, she said. On the average, 70% of such applications result in residential units being built. Each unit would have an average occupancy of 3.5 persons--an addition of more than 128,000 people, which would more than double the city’s population by the end of the century.

Booming Predictions

Cityhood backers, using such predictions, forecast that Santa Clarita will reach a population of 275,000 and become the third most populous city in the county, after Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Eventually, they argue, there will have to be a city because the county government, which is now the decision-making body for the area, is too remote to meet residents’ needs.

“I go into county government offices,” Worden said, “and most of them have maps that end at the San Fernando Valley on the north, and then there’s a little inset, that’s not even to scale, that shows where we live. Even the county workers don’t know where we are. They think we’re next to Lancaster. We’re 45 miles from Lancaster.”

Since they are split into small communities, residents of the Santa Clarita Valley have little identity to claim in the Southern California megalopolis, she said.

Residents of other areas usually cannot understand when she tries to tell them where she lives, Worden said, until, “in frustration, I give up and tell them ‘Magic Mountain.’ It’s the one thing they know about up here.” The Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park, with 2,500 employees and a 260-acre facility, would be one of the largest economic enterprises in the new city.

But along with making changes, Worden said, the committee also hopes to preserve some things about life in the Santa Clarita Valley, especially the Old West flavor.

Flight From South

The growing population of the area is made up of many people fleeing what they regard as the overpopulated city to the south.

In areas such as Newhall’s Placerita Canyon, many homeowners keep horses and have a pickup-truck-and-boots life style. The Chamber of Commerce in Newhall that is headquarters for the cityhood drive is filled with photos of pioneers and Old West artifacts.

It is literally the territory of the movie cowboy, the land where the buffalo roam.

Before the suburbanites began flowing in, many Westerns were shot in the Santa Clarita Valley. Melody Ranch, the Old West-style town and movie set where Gene Autry made films, is in one canyon. At William S. Hart Park in Newhall, on the estate the star of early cowboy movies willed to the county, there is a herd of nine buffalo.

“We’re trying to form a city to retain the flavor of our towns,” Garasi said.

“People move here from the city, and in six months, they’re instant pioneers,” Worden said. “We have a cohesiveness here. We pull together. Maybe when we get to look more like the San Fernando Valley, we’ll lose that.”

Three Hurdles

There are three hurdles the committee must get over to put the issue of cityhood before the voters.

First, the committee must gather the signatures of at least 25% of the registered voters within the proposed city on petitions to be submitted to the Local Agency Formation Commission, a Los Angeles County agency.

Committee members, who plan to begin the signature drive Nov. 1, express confidence that finding signers will be no problem. “The general consensus around here is strongly in favor of forming a city,” Garasi said.

Ten people telephoned to volunteer to distribute petitions after the committee announced its plan last week, he said, bringing the total to 35. “We want 200,” he said, to gather the 12,000 signatures needed.

Next, the plan faces a possibly more difficult hurdle. It must clear the Local Agency Formation Commission, which has a staff that investigates such proposals and prepares its own reports, going into such questions as whether a city would be economically viable, whether its incorporation would cause problems for other governmental bodies and whether there is any need for it.

The Sheriff’s Department and county Fire Department must prepare reports indicating plans and cost projections for their services.

Veto Power

The commission can reject the cityhood proposal or modify it--such as reducing the area the city would cover.

One of the seven members of the commission--which is made up of five county and city elected officials and two citizens--is Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose district includes the Santa Clarita Valley.

A spokesman for Antonovich said the supervisor believes that “the will of the people should prevail,” and he will support the cityhood move if he believes that is what most of the residents want and “they are fully aware of all the facts” about the economic effects of cityhood.

Finally, the commission forwards the approved or modified version of the plan to the Board of Supervisors. Unless more than 50% of the registered voters sign written protests to the board, the board must put the matter on the ballot.