County Split: an Unhappy Idea

At first blush it is a distinctly romantic notion, if not necessarily a unique one: Fed up with the way they are treated by the city folks of San Bernardino County, the hardy residents of California’s vast Mojave Desert decide to rebel and split off to form their own county. The new Mojave County would be the size of Vermont and New Hampshire combined, and would have a population of about 200,000--their destiny in their own hands.

Existing San Bernardino County, the largest in the nation, would shrink to the area of tiny Delaware but contain nearly 1 million residents. They would be clustered in the urbanized southwest corner of existing San Bernardino County including the cities of San Bernardino, Redlands, Ontario, Chino, Fontana and Upland.

A romantic idea, perhaps, but not terribly practical, nor would it guarantee solution of the problems about which desert people complain. Residents of the Mojave Desert and the San Bernardino Valley would be better off by rejecting the proposed split in the June 7 primary and working together to deal with the problems of growth and providing services to the county’s remote sections. To pass, the proposal must get a majority of voter support in each portion of the existing county.

It is easy to see why the desert dwellers are unhappy. The desert region is represented by just one member on the five-person county Board of Supervisors. They claim that they are not getting their fair share of county services and facilities. But this is not just a band of haggard desert rats seeking to maintain a frontier life. Much of the impetus for the county-division movement came from the rapidly growing exurban area of Victorville, Apple Valley and Hesperia. Many have fled across Cajon Pass in search of lower housing prices and now commute to jobs in San Bernardino, Riverside and even Orange County.

A governor’s commission that studied the split concluded that the new Mojave County would be economically viable. That is, it probably could raise enough revenue to sustain the new government. But it clearly would be a struggle economically, and there is no assurance that the big new county with a thin tax base could do a better job than the existing structure. Fractionating government is not the solution in an era that increasingly demands that areas work together to solve their interrelated problems.