Reining in Developers : Acton Residents Seek Cityhood to Stabilize Their Town’s Character

When Steve Miller was a child, his family kept horses in their Torrance back yard. That was in the early 1950s, before apartments ate up the open space and the city banned livestock in most residential neighborhoods.

As a young adult, Miller fled to Chatsworth, a place where he could ride his horses--even down Topanga Canyon Boulevard. But in the mid-1970s, when the developers moved in, Miller moved out.

Now Miller, 41, lives in Acton, a desert town just south of Palmdale in Los Angeles County. Although the community of 6,891 retains its small-town atmosphere and Old West flavor, Miller sees disconcerting signs of change: Ranches are being subdivided for tract homes, and equestrians who ride into town compete for road space with an increasing number of automobiles.

This time, Miller, who is president of the local Chamber of Commerce, has stopped running and started fighting back. Recently, he launched an incorporation drive in the hopes that Acton will someday become a city under local, instead of county control. But even Miller recognizes that the community lacks the tax base necessary to support essential services, such as a police force.

“We’re just trying to grab the reins early to preserve our life style,” said Miller, a large man with friendly gray eyes who owns a 2 1/2-acre lot and runs an auto-parts store in Acton. “We know it could take years.”

Ruth Benell, executive director of the county Local Agency Formation Commission, which has the final say over whether the 30-square-mile community becomes a city, said her staff will study whether incorporating Acton would be feasible.

Signatures Needed

First, she said, her office must receive an application signed by 25% of the community’s registered voters, or 25% of Acton property owners who own not less than a quarter of the assessed value of the total property in the area.

Miller said collecting the signatures would be easy because most Acton residents want to have total control over local planning and zoning, and other policy matters such as building inspection, animal control and law enforcement. Cityhood would make that possible.

But, Benell said, she doubts that the community has enough commercial development to become a separate, self-supporting entity. And some Acton residents, such as Fred Fate, 50, a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, said proponents of incorporation are “barking up the wrong tree,” unaware of the costs the new city would have to bear.

“Right now, if there is a pothole in town, we just call up the county, and they come and fix it,” Fate said. “If we incorporate, it all becomes the city’s problem, and we don’t have enough businesses to support services.”

With a business district composed of two dusty main streets lacking traffic lights and a couple of small shopping malls, one of which was built to resemble an old Western town, Acton at first glance appears far too rural to become a city in its own right.

Named in 1876 by pioneer land developer Henry M. Newhall after a town in his native Massachusetts, the community was settled by miners, who prospected for silver and gold in the surrounding hills and by ranchers who raised crops and kept livestock.

Rural Sights

Attesting to the community’s agrarian roots are signs posted near one of two small grocery stores warning equestrians not to tie horses to the railing and a bulletin board that advertises the sale of horses, laying hens and “pigs ready for slaughter.” Pickup trucks cruise through the town center at a snail’s pace, skirting horseback riders, though speeding is common on the back roads, perhaps because just one county sheriff’s deputy, Fate, is assigned to patrol all of Acton.

But bulldozers at work on slopes once dotted with yuccas and juniper trees are now a frequent sight in Acton, visible signs that the community is rapidly growing.

County planner George Malone said scores of projects for the area are on the drawing boards, most of them designed to meet the growing demand for cheaper housing than can be found in the San Fernando Valley or Los Angeles. A four-bedroom house on an acre of land in Acton costs about $230,000, said Richard Manyen, a local real estate agent. A comparable home in Northridge costs at least $400,000, said Julie Heiderich, a Sherman Oaks real estate agent.

The temptation to sell off ranchlands is great, but at least one rancher, Elizabeth Billet, whose grandparents homesteaded 40 acres in Acton in 1891, said she is determined to hold onto her property. She and her husband, Ray, live in the original house that her grandfather, a stonecutter from Switzerland, built of rocks from the bed of the nearby Santa Clara River. They keep bees and grow apples, pears and lilacs irrigated with the ample supply of well water lying under most of Acton.

“There might come a time when we have to sell off some land to be subdivided because it’s difficult to make a go of raising fruit,” Elizabeth Billet said. “But we’re not giving up yet.”

Shopping Centers

Other property owners have sold out, however. Construction of two shopping centers on large tracts is scheduled to begin soon, and although some Acton residents welcome the additional goods and services, many fear their rural way of life will vanish unless they can guarantee slow growth by wresting control over land use from the county.

“There were 13 houses on Red Rover Mine Road when I moved here in 1972, and now there are 60,” said Russ Gibbs, an ex-engineer who moved to Acton from Simi Valley, as he drank coffee and greeted friends at a local cafe. “I came here to get away from the city, and now it looks like the city has caught up with me.”

Gibbs and others view incorporation as a way to prevent Acton from being densely developed. Except for a half-square-mile area downtown, the community is zoned for a maximum of one unit an acre, and keeping horses and livestock is permitted in most neighborhoods. But many Acton residents fear that developers will succeed in getting zoning variances from the county to build at higher densities, and that light agriculture will be banned.

“Just wait and see what happens when a wind comes up after it rains and some guy from Los Angeles complains about the smell from six sows,” Gibbs said.

Grumbling About Newcomers

Complaints about newcomers usually take the form of polite grumbling about their relative lack of friendliness. But when a city dweller recently bought a roadside restaurant named Madeleine’s and refused to renew the lease of a hometown restaurateur who had been running it for years, the place was vandalized. Someone sprayed the outside of the building with slogans such as “Don’t Eat Here.”

Yet many newcomers to Acton, such as Renny and Bob Krieg, former residents of Sylmar who bought a 10-acre plot in Acton three years ago, are among the most vociferous defenders of their newly discovered Shangri-La. Bob, 41, is a brick mason who commutes to work in Pacific Palisades, and Renny, 37, teaches aerobics locally and helps tend to the couple’s vegetable garden, turkeys and horses.

“Keep Acton a secret or else it will turn into another Sylmar, with fast-food places and smog,” Renny Krieg said.

But Acton’s attractions have long been out of the closet, ever since California 14 was completed in the mid-1970s, opening up the area north of Santa Clarita into the Antelope Valley for development. The number of Acton residents has grown by about 157% since 1970, when it was 2,686, to 6,891 in July of 1987, according to U.S. Bureau of Census figures and data compiled by Los Angeles County planners.

The population of a larger area including Palmdale and Lancaster, which are about 9 and 20 miles away from Acton, respectively, is projected to more than double by 2010, from about 146,000 in July, 1987, to 300,500, according to Malone, the county planner in charge of population research for the region.

Annexation Anxiety

“I understand their fear that as Palmdale grows, it might try to annex them, because of the past Palmdale practice of trying to annex nearly everything in sight,” Malone said. “But I know of no effort whatsoever in Palmdale to do anything of the sort.”

Palmdale City Manager Bob Toone said Palmdale has no interest in annexing Acton because it is too far away and his city’s sphere of influence, or potential city limits as determined by county officials, now encompasses 70 square miles.

Reassurances from county planners and Palmdale officials carry little weight in Acton, where distrust is the rule. Dick Morris, 48, an Acton resident for 13 years who runs one of three feed stores in town, tells a typical “horror story” about the county’s effort to make him get rid of 62 fallow deer from Iran that he lends to Christmas tree lots in the winter because they resemble reindeer.

Morris said that even though he had federal and state permits to keep the deer, the county refused to grant him a local permit because his property was not zoned for undomesticated livestock. Morris said the county finally relented when he presented zoning board members with a petition signed by 4,000 area residents.

“My neighbor can keep a bull that would just as soon kill you, but I couldn’t have some tame deer that are classified as wild because they’re from a foreign country,” said Morris, as he petted his favorite buck, a 4-year-old named “Killer.”

“That just goes to show you that the county is too far away to understand us.”

Antonovich Meetings

Dave Vannatta, planning and development deputy for Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents the area, said he meets dozens of times annually with Acton citizens on a variety of issues and that a general plan for the Antelope Valley was approved about two years ago with the input of local residents.

The plan calls for keeping Acton largely rural, except for an area of about half a square mile at the south end of Crown Valley Road, which is zoned for three units an acre, Vannatta said. Virtually the rest of the town is zoned for one unit an acre or two acres, he said.

Vannatta said he thinks it is just a matter of time until Acton residents realize that, with the general plan, they are safe from “the big developer out there they’re afraid is ready to pounce on them.” But, he said, Antonovich will support the incorporation drive if that’s what the community really wants.

Sherry Foote, a deputy for Antonovich, said residents have a tendency to blame Antonovich or the county for “anything that they don’t like, or didn’t expect.” She said some of the housing projects that now are being built in Acton were approved in the 1970s.

Search for Graves

When workers began grading in preparation for a housing project next to the old Acton cemetery, where some graves date back to 1861, residents banded together. The group was able to get the developer, Casden Co. of Beverly Hills, to dig trenches on three acres of nearby land believed by some to contain additional graves the citizens wanted preserved. No bones were found, but the residents were pleased that the developer paid attention to their wishes.

With development evident throughout the area, Acton will never be the sleepy little ranching community that it was years ago, said Bob Milburn, 72, a retired telephone executive whose family owns 640 acres. Long gone are the days when the one grocery store keeper in town left a key so residents could shop unsupervised when he went fishing, he said.

“It used to be I knew everybody when I went into town,” Milburn said. “Now I know one out of 10 faces.”

Edie Jeskie, an equipment rental store owner who moved from Los Angeles to Acton 14 years ago, hopes her fellow citizens do not give up the fight to retain the area’s rural character.

“The answer is to become real active in the community, in anything that happens in the community,” Jeskie said. “I’m still on the fence post about incorporation, but if it will mean Acton is controlled by Acton, then it might work out.”