Personality Clashes, Lack of Cash Mark Effort to Form New City

In the last weeks before its deadline for putting a cityhood vote on the November ballot, a committee studying the incorporation of a handful of communities in northwestern Riverside County has been scrambling to overcome personality clashes and financial difficulties.

Acrimony within the Jurupa Study Committee--and, at least until recently, a poor record of raising money--has threatened to derail, or at least delay, the group’s efforts to bring cityhood to a vote in Mira Loma, Glen Avon, Pedley, Rubidoux, Sunnyslope, Indian Hills, Jurupa Hills and Agua Manza.

Chairman Jack Gallagher already has resigned from the committee under pressure from cityhood supporters who threatened to withhold financial contributions unless he stepped down.

Back on Track

Now committee members say the drive to form a City of Jurupa is back on track, particularly when it comes to raising money.

Supporters of the drive claim the semi-rural area pays about $6 million a year more in taxes than it receives in services from Riverside County.

By incorporating as a city, proponents say, residents could retain a greater share of their tax dollars and gain local control of land-use planning, thereby determining the area’s patterns of growth and enabling them to protect their communities’ identities.

Incorporation would also protect those communities from eventual annexation into the neighboring cities of Riverside and Norco. Officials in Norco have expressed their interest in adding a prime section of the Jurupa area, at the intersection of two freeways, to their city.

The proposed city could also give Glen Avon residents a stronger position from which to pressure officials in Sacramento and Washington to clean up the Stringfellow Acid Pits, widely regarded as California’s worst toxic-waste site.

A month ago, Jurupa Study Committee members were wringing their hands over a $25 rental fee that the local parks and recreation district began charging them to hold weekly meetings in the Jurupa Community Center. And as recently as last week, co-chairman Karen Shuerger conceded, the group’s bank account was empty.

This week, however, the committee claimed a dramatic financial turnaround, receiving “several thousand” dollars in contributions, according to treasurer Gail Larkin. Neither Larkin nor other officers, however, would provide specific figures on the group’s fund raising.

‘Starting to Fly’

The study committee “is up and starting to fly,” said member Tony Miller, one of those who pressured Gallagher to resign. Even with the past week’s infusion of funds, though, the group is left with a long road to travel in a very short time.

To put the cityhood question to the voters, the study committee must set a process of review and hearings in motion by meeting several requirements, said Mischelle Zimmerman, executive officer of the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission, which handles incorporation and annexation requests.

The group must submit a feasibility study showing that the new city would be economically viable, collect signatures requesting a vote from at least a quarter of the area’s 26,000 registered voters and pay $1,550 in application and environmental assessment fees, Zimmerman said.

To make the November ballot, a consultant to the Jurupa Study Committee estimated, those steps would have to be completed by Feb. 15.

“It would be a tight schedule, coming in (with the study, petitions and fees) in February for a November election,” Zimmerman said.

The feasibility study, which projects that the new city could sustain the area’s present level of public services and still retain a substantial budget surplus, was completed early in January by Don King, a planner and consultant based in Rancho Cucamonga.

But King at first refused to release his study until he received payment for his work. By Thursday, the study committee had paid only $2,000 of his $15,000 fee.

“Obviously, I would like to be paid in full,” King said, but “if they don’t have the total fee available, I need some guarantee I will be paid.”

Lent Copies of Report

King relented last week, however, lending two copies of his report to committee member Miller. He received no guarantee of payment, only a signed promise that the study would not be duplicated or submitted before the bill is paid, King said.

Miller needs the report, King said, to raise funds and gather support for the committee. “I’m trying very hard not to throw cold water on the incorporation,” he added.

The committee will pay for the study by Monday, Miller predicted. “I still, if it is required, will guarantee the shortfall.”

Miller announced last month that he would front the money to pay King and to begin a petition drive but later conditioned his loan upon Gallagher’s ouster.

Gallagher’s political activities, including an abortive recall drive against county Supervisor Melba Dunlap, have damaged the committee’s credibility in the community, Miller said.

“I felt that there was a political connotation attached to his other activities . . . that ground to a halt the ability of the study committee to move forward,” he said.

Others familiar with the committee’s workings said that Gallagher’s leadership was often autocratic, that he was unwilling to delegate responsibilities, such as fund raising, to other committee members.

Several cityhood supporters, Shuerger said, joined Miller in withholding contributions from the committee until Gallagher resigned. Still others, however, had pledged funds on the condition that Gallagher retain the chairmanship.

Says He Kept Promises

In the midst of that turmoil last week, Gallagher reportedly offered to resign if his opponents on the committee could come up with the estimated $25,000 needed to keep the cityhood drive alive.

“Everything that I had promised to do, I did,” Gallagher said, citing his formation of the study committee and the completion of the feasibility study on incorporation. “I apologize if I stepped on anyone’s toes or kicked anyone I shouldn’t have kicked, but we got things done.”

His Rubidoux printing business suffered because of the time he devoted to the cityhood effort, Gallagher said in an interview, so he was already planning to step down once the group’s self-imposed Feb. 15 deadline had passed.

“I don’t care what they say about me,” Gallagher said Tuesday night, after the committee formally accepted his resignation. “I still believe if I wanted to be chairman, I could be chairman.”

Shuerger and Jaxon Miller, vice chairmen under Gallagher, succeeded him as the group’s co-chairmen.

Since Gallagher’s departure, Tony Miller asserted, “all the money (for the feasibility study, the petition drive and the application fee) has been put up or guaranteed now.”

And the group’s consultant said he is “optimistic that the filing will occur on the 15th. I am enthusiastic, with the committee, that things are snowballing right now and going very well,” King said.

Planning Signature Drive

The study committee is talking with private firms about collecting signatures for its petitions, Shuerger said. “We’re looking at sending them out the end of this week . . . or else the first of next week.

Although using a private company to circulate petitions could cost the committee between 50 cents and $1.50 per signature, Tony Miller said, it is the only way committee members can collect more than 7,000 signatures before their Feb. 15 deadline.

“There is a time factor,” Miller said. “(It is) the committee’s feeling that it could not get itself organized to get it done.”

Gallagher believes the committee can complete its work within two weeks. “It shouldn’t take more than five days (to collect the required signatures), with 30 or 40 people hitting the street working on it.”