A New City’s Responsibilities

Last Thursday, Mission Viejo officially became Orange County’s 27th city. It is the first new city in the county since 1971, when Irvine incorporated. Others will surely follow. Dana Point’s incorporation is on the June ballot, and other areas in the rapidly growing southern part of the county, like Laguna Niguel, are considering doing the same.

Historically, incorporation and growth have gone hand in hand in Orange County. The more growth, traffic congestion and loss of open space, the more an area wants local control of its destiny and development, instead of leaving it to the five supervisors down the freeway at the county seat, none of whom may even live in the neighborhood.

As Orange County’s newest city, Mission Viejo now has that home rule--and the opportunity to decide for itself how it will grow. But, as other cities, including Irvine, have found out, the impact of land-use decisions can’t be contained by city boundary lines drawn on a map.

In the urban area that Orange County has become, what one community does ultimately affects almost everyone. A city’s land-use decisions have regional impacts on traffic, air pollution and the imbalance that exists between the job market and affordable housing for workers. And because of that ripple-in-the-pond-effect, every city has regional responsibilities that realistically must at times take precedence over the parochial attitudes that prompted incorporation.

For example, will the new Mission Viejo city government truly accept its fair share responsibility to provide housing for minorities and moderate-income residents or will it put the burden on the older cities by deliberately limiting development and keeping home prices too high?

Mission Viejo has an opportunity to strike a balance between the need to accommodate more healthy growth and still preserve the amenities that made living there attractive in the first place. The new city will be watched closely to see if, and how, it does that.