Bill Would Allow Growth Over Boundary : Cities Say It’s Greener on Other Side of County Line

Nearly a decade later, San Clemente Fire Marshal Gary Carmichael still remembers waiting for the fierce blaze that advanced from San Diego County toward his firefighting crews, who were powerless to step beyond the county line.

When the fire finally reached the Orange County border on a windy January evening in 1976, it had grown in such intensity that 16 homes in the community were destroyed and 69 others were damaged.

“That atrocity,” as he calls it, will be among examples used by City Manager James Hendrickson when he argues before a legislative committee in San Diego today that cities like San Clemente should be allowed to annex territory in neighboring counties.

For practical reasons--and some say just plain greed--officials in several California cities that touch county borders are interested in annexing beyond those borders.

Municipal officials in cities like San Clemente, Kingsburg, Galt, Delano and Watsonville say poverty, crime and community blight are problems that spill into their communities from areas just beyond their jurisdiction.

But across those boundaries are other local officials who predict widespread confusion over everything from tax collections to police and fire calls if such annexations are allowed.

“It’s just crazy,” said Patricia Gayman, Sacramento-based lobbyist for San Diego County. “How do you deliver services if you have cities across the lines of two counties?”

Besides, opponents say, city officials who want to expand into other counties--especially those in San Clemente--are really much more interested in capturing more tax revenue than in improving the quality of government on either side.

“It is purely money. It has nothing to do with anything else,” said John Sweeten, San Diego County director of intergovernmental affairs. “They’ve (San Clemente officials have) raised some red herrings . . . .”

In San Clemente, even advocates of annexing San Diego County territory concede that money is the chief issue.

San Clemente officials use the 1976 fire as an example of the capriciousness of county lines, although a mutual-aid agreement with Marine Corps officials at nearby Camp Pendleton now guarantees that San Clemente firefighters will never again have to wait for a fire to cross the county line.

But this year, the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, just south of the city’s borders, will pay $27.4 million in property taxes, all of which will go to San Diego County and its local governments.

But San Clemente, the closest city to the plant, is the one that sends paramedics there when needed.

In recent negotiations, San Diego County agreed to pay San Clemente $5,000 annually for paramedic runs. But city officials say the new contract, which took effect last week, does not begin to cover its costs.

“Our simple contention is that it seems a little bit ludicrous . . . ,” said Hendrickson, who cited more than 200 instances when San Clemente fire, police and paramedics were dispatched to San Diego County in the past three years.

“They (San Diego County) did not provide one whit of service,” for the tax revenues they receive, Hendrickson added.

But 17 miles south of the power plant, officials in Oceanside say they should annex the area if anyone does.

For years, the City of Oceanside has been rebuffed in its efforts to annex the 196 square miles of U.S. government property, which includes the Camp Pendleton U.S. Marine base, the nuclear power plant and a state park.

Although San Clemente is much closer to the nuclear power plant, which is the area’s only significant taxpayer, Oceanside Councilman Ted Marioncelli said more than two-thirds of Marine personnel at Camp Pendleton live near Oceanside.

The area near San Clemente is mostly vacant land, said Marioncelli. And, he said, Oceanside would compensate San Clemente “for . . . the impact on their city” if Oceanside were allowed to annex the Marine base.

Assemblyman Robert Frazee (R-Carlsbad) predicted the tax money at stake probably would preclude a bill and constitutional amendment by state Sen. Rose Ann Vuich (D-Dinuba) from ever being applied in northern San Diego County.

Vuich’s proposals would allow cities like San Clemente to expand across county boundaries. But in its current form, the bill would require approval by both counties’ boards of supervisors.

“I don’t think that is very likely,” said Frazee, whose district includes northern San Diego County and San Clemente. “I don’t see that happening in the case of San Diego and Orange counties.”

But Frazee said he will probably support Vuich’s bill as it stipulates that both counties must agree to any annexation.

“I think the bill is needed in some other places around the state,” Frazee said.

But state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), who also represents both counties, said she is not certain she will support Vuich’s bill.

Sought Special District

“I’d like to see how the hearing comes out and I’d like to hear the discussion,” said Bergeson, who tried to create a special service district straddling the county line in 1981, when she was still an assemblywoman.

Bergeson’s bill, intended to allow San Clemente to capture tax revenues from the military base and the nuclear power plant, died in the Senate Local Government Committee.

“I think San Clemente has raised some valid points,” said Bergeson. “Those services that are provided should be compensated. But anytime you cross county lines, it complicates matters . . . . “

Twenty-six states, including Texas, New York and Pennsylvania, have cities that straddle county lines. But none ever has in California.

Twenty six years ago, the 2nd District Court of Appeal ruled, in a case involving the City of Palo Alto, that such annexations would not only involve “manifest practical inconveniences” but also would be unconstitutional.

For example, cities have to be within one Municipal Court district, the court said. It took a statewide voter-approved constitutional amendment in 1976 to allow the sprawling city of San Diego to set up a separate court branch at San Ysidro.

While some counties are divided by rivers, creeks, canyons and ridges, the border between Orange and San Diego counties is just a line drawn by surveyors in 1889, using a haphazard combination of ranch property lines and Spanish land grants as guides, historians say.

On both sides of the line, officials are at best cautiously optimistic that the Legislature can help them end the dispute, which intensified when the first of San Onofre’s three nuclear-generating units opened in 1968.

Even if all the local governments involved could agree, the Marines Corps, which owns all the land involved (including property leased to the utilities for the nuclear plant and to the state for the park) aren’t interested in being annexed to any entity.

Golf Course Delay

Border concerns have even been a delaying factor to the development of a golf course that was to be a gift to the area by then-President Richard M. Nixon. The former president, who lived nearby, arranged a 50-year lease on 180 acres of government property in 1971.

But nothing has happened on the land, which is just inside San Diego County and next to the existing San Clemente Municipal golf course.

Because he is involved in sensitive negotiations with the military over the final plans for the golf course, Hendrickson doesn’t like to talk about it now. But he conceded:

“If it was all in San Clemente, it would have definitely been built by now.”