Rural Valley Area Draws the Line Over Redistricting Plan

Downtown Los Angeles, that bastion of marble palaces and traffic and crowds, apartment houses and industrial squalor, rises in the smog a good 25 miles from Ralph Burns’ country home, which is close enough by Burns’ thinking.

Never mind that Burns’ baby-blue ranch-style house, smack in the midst of a Lake View Terrace housing tract and home to Ralph and his wife Ruth for 23 years now, shouts suburbia. Never mind that his pets are not horses and sheep, but a German shepherd and a half-coyote mixed breed, guardians that sound a fierce warning should anyone unexpected wander past the station wagon in the driveway toward the front door.

To Ralph Burns’ mind, this whole area, the arc of Lake View Terrace to Sunland to Tujunga, is as rural as the city of Los Angeles gets, and now the City Council threatens to take it all away.

“They don’t care about us,” he fumed, sitting in his living room, tapping his hands nervously. “We’re all getting stabbed in the back!”

What has Ralph Burns, and hundreds like him, fired up is the latest turn in the city’s redistricting battle. The death last month of Councilman Howard Finn, who had represented the 1st District for five years, left the area up for grabs. Under a remapping plan set to be formally approved Wednesday--unless the residents can stop it--the acreage will be carved into two separate districts.

The plan, tentatively approved by the council last week, would place some of the rural residents in Ernani Bernardi’s 7th District and the rest in Joel Wachs’ 2nd District. The current 1st District’s suburban population, living in Sylmar, Sun Valley and Pacoima, also would be split between the two council members. But those residents, though making up most of the district’s population, are not the ones who are the angriest.

Complaints about the plan come predominantly from residents of the rural sections, who feel that the existing political boundaries are crucial to preserving the character of their area. While Finn was a longtime Sunland resident, neither Bernardi nor Wachs lives in the area.

“Why should we be split up?” said Maggie Susersky, whose Sunland home would share a district with urban Van Nuys under the new plan. “We have nothing in common with Van Nuys, nothing in common.”

The previous twists in the city’s months-long redistricting odyssey have angered residents in Hancock Park, Koreatown, the Eastside and other pockets of Los Angeles. Uniformly, they complained that they were being sacrificed for political expedience.

Now, with the onus shifted to the far northeastern edge of the city, residents there are up in arms. With little effort, they conjure up images of the South before the war--the Civil War--and Boston before the Tea Party.

One resident, borrowing a line handed down by Revolutionary War patriots, suggested at a council hearing last week that if northeast residents weren’t going to get representation, perhaps they shouldn’t bother with the taxation part either.

Whether a change of districts will have any concrete impact on the lives of the northeast residents is subject to dispute. It has also been lost in the shuffle.

For far from being considered a bureaucratic process, redistricting has pricked a communal nerve. For years, like pioneer settlers, residents of the city’s northeast have braved the summer fires and the winter floods and have had only a simple request of City Hall--that it leave them alone. Now they are being bothered.

“We don’t know if we’re coming or going,” said Burns, 66, a retired maintenance carpenter who is president of the Lake View Terrace Improvement Assn. “It’s just like a dangerous civil war . . . a house divided against itself.”

The hilly northeast, despite the recent encroachments of progress, is different from the rest of the city, and not only in its rural spirit. The scrub-brush hills, faded now by the heat of summer, still rise behind blocks of houses. Roads near the edges of housing tracts tend to be dirt. Horses compete with trees as the most common occupants of backyards.

Foothill Boulevard, the main drag, is cheek-by-jowl with a mix of the newfangled and the old-fashioned, fast-food joints and mom-and-pop stores. Off the street are establishments such as the Cowboy Cleaners, a dry cleaning firm where hay bales line the inside windows, and the Sunshine Ranch, which to a casual observer seems to consist of a pen holding two sheep and several horses.

Not everyone in the area is smitten with the subject of redistricting. Drugs and high rents, one merchant allowed, are still the hot topics at his market. But by word of mouth and media emphasis, more and more people are talking about redistricting, and more and more are getting angry.

Susersky, who lives off Sunland Boulevard with her husband and two children, fears that their sense of rural community will be lost if the area is split in two.

“It’s really very unique,” she said. “It’s rural country, it’s hills, it’s horses. We’re a different kind of community than anyone else in the city. We’re proud of it, happy with it. We’re rebels.”

Susersky is among those who fear that a new representative, living outside the area, might not appreciate the natural state of the hillsides and the canyon washes. A few years ago, she recalled, there was talk of allowing a dump in a canyon. Political savvy kept it from happening, she suggested; someone unfamiliar with the damage done when winter floodwaters course down the canyons might not be so vigilant.

“Anyone who’s been in a storm up here would know it was going to be disastrous,” she said.

‘I Hate Progress’

“The hillsides are already being chopped up and developments put in,” she said. Then she laughed. “I hate progress.”

Likewise Lallie Kunkel, who has lived for 22 years on McGroarty Street, a dirt hillside road that winds past the last row of houses on the southern edge of Sunland. She fears less the threat of urban progress than whether there will be anyone to listen when residents call with problems.

“It’s a political move,” she said firmly, a little white poodle yipping in the doorway where she stood. Like many others, she recalled Finn’s tenure.

“He was a very concerned person,” she said. “That’s mainly what we want, not someone who doesn’t live here. . . . It’s just that we would like a fair shake.”

A fair shake is all that Ralph Burns wants as well. His delights are simple; he has his house and his dogs and a little plaster water fountain out back. At night, less than a dozen cars wind past his house. There would be a million if he lived in the city, he figures.

‘We Don’t Need L.A.’

“We don’t need to build those marble palaces. We don’t need L.A.,” he said, shaking his head somberly.

“We don’t mind a few houses. . . . But we want to stay rural.”

Both Burns and Susersky have collected signatures on petitions calling for the unification of the 1st District. Burns collected the first 200 without even trying, he boasted. And if the petitions don’t convince the City Council, and don’t convince Mayor Tom Bradley--well, Ralph Burns and his friends still have plans.

They could take it to court, he said; stand up for their rights, maybe even win one from the city folks. In front of his neatly kept garage, he chortled a farewell to some visitors.

“We’re madder than hell,” he said, laughing. “And we’re not going to take it anymore.”