Builders Behind Drive to Block Santa Clarita Cityhood, Backers Say

Developers are behind two secretive organizations that have surfaced to oppose cityhood in the Santa Clarita Valley, leaders of the incorporation drive charged Thursday.

The opposition, which has sent three anti-cityhood mailers to voters since Saturday, is waging a surreptitious campaign through “distortion and innuendo, using as a front any local post office box they can claim as a temporary home,” said Louis Garasi, vice chairman of the City of Santa Clarita Formation Commission.

Addresses used by the organizations--the Santa Clarita Caution Committee and the Coalition for the Right City--are that of a Newhall mail-receiving company, the Mail Handler on San Fernando Road, Garasi said. The company is owned by Dennis Diatorre, also a member of Citizens Against Cityhood, a third anti-cityhood group headed by Valencia resident Anthony J. Skirlick Jr.

Denies Involvement

Diatorre earlier this week denied involvement with the two other organizations and said he has no knowledge of the identity of their backers. Skirlick said he was approached by developers’ representative Richard Wirth of the Building Industry Assn. of Southern California but refused any association with other anti-cityhood groups.

Garasi said he believes Skirlick’s effort is “an honest one.”

But, in the other two groups, he said, “We of the formation committee have no doubts about the secret involvement of the developers, who want power over our lives to stay in the hands of their friends, the supervisors.”

Through their last-minute mailings before the Nov. 3 cityhood election, Garasi said, the anti-cityhood groups are trying to demolish in two weeks an effort that has taken more than two years to accomplish.

Garasi estimated that developers have spent more than $100,000 for their mailings to voters, “and we know there’s more coming.”

To counter the anti-cityhood attacks, formation committee leaders passed the hat and collected in two days more than $6,000 in contributions toward the $10,000 they said they need to send one campaign mailing to voters. They vowed to collect the rest of the funds needed by today.

“We need to restate to the community what cityhood is all about,” formation commission spokeswoman Connie Worden said. The mailer, she said, will “clear the air of the stench of the developers’ half-truths and misrepresentations.”

Several of the 25 city council candidates in the proposed city contributed $200 each to help pay for the pro-cityhood mailer. Candidate Michael Lyons said his donation was about a third of his campaign war chest. Richard Vacar calls his donation a “quid pro quo for sleaze.” Carl Boyer III said he collected $325 from voters in his precinct who are “mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.”

Civic Groups Donate

Other sizable donations came from members of the Soroptimist Club, the Santa Clarita Civic Assn., Citizens for Fair Prison Sites, an animal rights group, and several homeowner organizations.

Worden said the $200 figure was chosen at the suggestion of candidate Janice Heidt because 1987 is the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. Cityhood for Santa Clarita would represent independence from the rule and “taxation without adequate representation” from the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, Worden said.

Formation committee leaders produced a “Santa Clarita Bill of Rights” focusing on 10 freedoms they said they do not have under county government. They include freedom from the “disastrous and hidden influence of developers,” from prisons and from power plants, to have local control and to have use of the area’s tax dollars.

Garasi also made public the formation committee’s latest campaign-spending report filed Thursday. The report showed cityhood backers have spent $22,256 and collected $20,610 in cash contributions. “We’re more than $1,000 in the red,” Garasi said.

The formation committee also has received contributions of services, such as free legal advice and office space, worth $21,357.

“Our aboveboard actions and our absolute openness about where we get our support stands in stark contrast to the veil of secrecy cloaking the developers from public scrutiny,” Garasi said. “We challenge the developers to get all their anti-cityhood committees to open their books, so our concerned citizens can follow the paper trail and see just where the money flow begins.”

A spokesman for one anti-cityhood committee, the Coalition for the Right City, said the group’s campaign statement will be on file with the county today, as required by law. The Santa Clarita Caution Committee is in the process of filing the proper campaign papers, a spokeswoman said.