Vote on Calabasas Cityhood Appears Assured

Leaders of a Calabasas cityhood campaign said Wednesday that they have collected enough signatures on petitions to call for an incorporation election this year.

About 2,400 of the community’s nearly 8,000 registered voters have signed petitions asking for a November incorporation vote for a 30-square-mile area at the western edge of the San Fernando Valley, according to Robert Hill, chairman of the Calabasas Cityhood Study Committee.

Hill’s 2-year-old group had been required by state law to obtain signatures from 25% of the area’s voters to qualify for an election. That comes to 1,965 names, according to Los Angeles County election officials.

Committee members who fanned out in the semi-rural community with petitions Oct. 25 had hoped to collect 2,500 signatures. They said the extra names would provide a safety margin in case some signers were not registered voters or mistakenly signed the petitions twice.

20% Surplus

“We’re a little short of what we’d wanted, but I’m encouraged that we have a 20% surplus,” Hill said.

The petitions will be delivered Monday morning to administrators of the county’s Local Agency Formation Commission, Hill said. The county officials will prepare an economic analysis of the incorporation request and schedule a public hearing on the issue.

If the cityhood plan passes muster at those two stages, county supervisors will vote whether to place the issue on the November ballot.

Ruth Benell, executive officer of the formation commission, said the Calabasas committee will just barely give the county enough time to review the incorporation request and hold a November vote. The Calabasas group legally has until April 25 to turn in the petitions, but that would have been too late to qualify for an election this year, she said.

“Things will have to move pretty much on clockwork because an election has to be called by supervisors 90 days before election day,” Benell said.

Revenue to Be Studied

She said her office will spend the next four months collecting tax-revenue figures for the Calabasas area from state agencies. Those totals will be compared with the estimated cost of municipal services for the proposed city to see if it could support itself.

Calabasas cityhood leaders have proposed to contract with the county for such services as engineering and fire and police protection, as the neighboring cities of Hidden Hills, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village do.

If projected revenues fail to cover the predicted costs, Benell said, she would urge commission members to reject the cityhood proposal and terminate the incorporation committee’s application without sending it to the Board of Supervisors.

But cityhood backers have predicted that Calabasas’ revenues will easily outdistance city expenses. They say that dozens of tax-generating businesses have opened recently in Calabasas Park and along the Ventura Freeway.

Seek Local Control

The two primary objectives of cityhood, Hill said, are to return tax dollars to the area where they are generated and to gain local control over such things as land use.

The proposed city would include the commercial area and six loosely knit residential neighborhoods--Calabasas Park, Mulwood, Monte Nido, Malibu Canyon Park, Calabasas Highlands and Saratoga Hills. The center of the city would be a vast rural area crossed by Mulholland Highway.

Calabasas’ proposed municipal boundaries would be the Los Angeles city limits on the east, the Hidden Hills city limits and the Ventura County line on the north and the Santa Monica Mountains’ irregular main ridge line on the south. Las Virgenes Road and the Agoura Hills city limits would be the western boundaries.