Ballot Choices Reflect Increased Desire for Local Control

In distant corners of metropolitan Southern California, the message from election returns Wednesday was that voters yearn to more closely exercise control of important issues--especially the building boom that has provided the good life for thousands but also clogged the freeways and contributed to smog.

The desire was expressed in part by the creation of three new cities that stripped power away from county supervisors, the local officials with the biggest constituencies and the least personal contact, and gave control to city councils that are, at least in theory, more easily reachable when problems arise.

Residents of Santa Clarita, which was carved from the Los Angeles County communities of Newhall, Saugus, Valencia and parts of Canyon Country, as well as people in the new cities of Mission Viejo and Highland, will be able to complain about bad streets or foul-tasting tap water to their own municipal officials.

In other areas, the desire for local control came out in votes that reduced plans for growth, rejected requests for higher taxes or set down new rules for local officials. In San Diego, for instance, voters decided they did not want a street named after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while in Westlake Village voters said that pay raises for city officials must be put to a public vote. Irvine ordered that from now on, the mayor be elected by the people instead of chosen in secret by the City Council.

The three new metropolitan-area cities and a fourth in Twenty-nine Palms in the San Bernardino County desert represent the latest evidence of a trend that began after California voters sent a shock wave through government by passing Proposition 13 in 1978.

By limiting property taxes, Proposition 13 removed a key objection to cityhood. New cities could no longer add to the tax burden of residents. A binge of movements to form new cities, mostly out of newly developing suburbs, followed.

Secession Attempt

Before Tuesday’s election, 27 new municipal governments had been created in California since Proposition 13 was approved by voters. The voters made cities of long-existing areas like West Hollywood and Moorpark and created entirely new place names such as Agoura Hills, which before then was known simply as Agoura.

Santa Clarita, an area of more than 100,000 residents in the foothill valleys north of the San Fernando Valley, has a long history of seeking local control. In the 1970s the area voted to secede from Los Angeles County, but the plan was foiled by voters in the rest of the county who declined the offer.

This time the issue was independence from the clutches of the distant Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, who hold their meetings 40 miles away in downtown Los Angeles. And the policy of the supervisors that most rankles the new city is the practice of allowing new development on the foothills.

“We’ve survived the greedy developers,” said Art Donnelly, chairman of the Santa Clarita Formation Committee as voting results came in on Tuesday. “Their heavy spending against the cityhood effort backfired. It was overkill on their part, and they alienated our citizens.”

Mission Viejo was less upset about future development since the new city, a landmark along Interstate 5 in south Orange County, is a master-planned community. There the driving issue for residents who spurred the incorporation campaign was home rule.

Home rule and growth were both behind the vote in San Bernardino County, the fastest-growing region of Southern California that created the new cities of Highland and Twentynine Palms.

In most new cities, home rule has come to mean control over finances, especially the sales taxes that cities receive on all retail sales within their boundaries. But when power reverts from a county board of supervisors to a city, the new council also assumes the power to shape the way the city looks and to set priorities for a wide variety of services. When the city of West Hollywood incorporated, the council was able to make a dramatic dent in serious crime by paying the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which patrols the city, to put more deputies on the street.

Cityhood fervor was not universal. Incorporation ballot measures failed in Goleta in Santa Barbara County and in Yucaipa in San Bernardino County.

But approval of the four new cities Tuesday could add life to an incorporation campaign in Malibu, which is unhappy with Los Angeles County over plans to build costly sewers, and in Calabasas in the west San Fernando Valley. An enclave of coastal Orange County between Laguna Niguel and Dana Point is also talking loudly about cityhood.

Vote for Slower Growth

The voters’ desire to control growth was felt the strongest Tuesday in Riverside County, where Measure C, placed on the ballot by unhappy residents, passed by a slim margin. The measure aims to more closely manage development and reduce traffic by slowing growth in the hills and in agricultural areas. Measure C was written to expand the restrictions of a 1979 Riverside ballot measure.

“It’s a clear indication that people in Riverside want managed growth, and they want to have the problems of congestion, poor air quality, overcrowded schools and unnecessary conversion of important resources dealt with,” said Bill Havert, conservation coordinator for a local Sierra Club chapter. “The citizens don’t believe local government is dealing with those issues in an effective and responsible manner.”

Elsewhere in Riverside County, however, the affluent desert city of Indian Wells turned down an initiative that tried to stop the proposed $1-billion Sunterra hotel and convention resort. City officials had earlier approved the massive project although opponents had argued that the development was too large for the small city.

Voters passed local measures adding controls on growth in two other places--the San Bernardino County city of Redlands and the Orange County community of Cypress.

Another result of Proposition 13 is the requirement that voters approve most increases in taxes by cities and other agencies of local government.

Most New Taxes Fail

Around Southern California on Tuesday, most efforts to impose new taxes on voters failed.

Utility tax measures were defeated in South Pasadena and El Segundo, while voters in Stanton in Orange County decided not to impose a property tax levy that would have ensured that the Police Department is not disbanded.

The only cities to approve tax measures were Hermosa Beach, which raised the utility tax rate; La Mirada, which raised hotel, motel and business license taxes, and Thousand Oaks, which raised the hotel tax.

Times staff writer Louis Sahagun contributed to this story.