Winds of Change Blowing Up Storm of Dissent in Once-Peaceful Acton

When Steve Miller grew up in Torrance, his family kept horses in the 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, where he could ride his horses--even down Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Then in the mid-1970s, when the developers moved in, Miller moved out.

Now Miller, 41, lives in Acton, a desert community of 6,891 just south of Palmdale that retains a small-town atmosphere and Old West flavor. But again he 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, he is not running.

The president of the local Chamber of Commerce, Miller has launched an incorporation drive in the hope that Acton will someday become a city under local, instead of county, control.

But the latest cityhood campaign in Los Angeles County--after those in communities such as Malibu, Calabasas and Santa Clarita, which is less than 20 miles away from of Acton--is largely symbolic, at least for now. Even Miller recognizes that his tiny town 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. “We know it could take years.”

If he collects enough signatures--25% of the community’s voters--the county Local Agency Formation Commission will have to decide whether cityhood is feasible for Acton. Ruth Benell, executive director of the commission, said she doubts that the 30-square-mile area in northern Los Angeles County has enough commercial development to become a self-supporting entity.

Indeed, 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 hardly fits the image of a city.

Named for Massachusetts Town

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

Attesting to the community’s roots are signs posted near one of two small grocery stores warning equestrians not to tie their 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, although speeding is common on the back roads, perhaps because only one county sheriff’s deputy is assigned to patrol all of Acton.

But bulldozers at work are now a frequent sight on slopes once dotted with yuccas and juniper trees.

Scores of Projects Planned

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 less-expensive housing than can be found in the San Fernando Valley or other parts of Los Angeles. A four-bedroom house on an acre of land, which would cost at least $400,000 in Northridge, goes for about $230,000 in Acton, real estate agents said.

The temptation to sell off ranchland is great, but at least one rancher, Elizabeth Billet, whose grandparents homesteaded 40 acres in Acton in 1891, said she is determined to hold on to her property. She and her husband, Ray, live in the 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.”

Other property owners have sold out, however, and construction of two shopping centers on large tracts is scheduled to begin soon. Although some Acton residents welcome the additional goods and services, many fear their rural way of life will vanish.

“There were 13 houses on Red Rover Mine Road when I moved here in 1972, and now there are 60,” said Russ Gibbs, a former 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.”

Worry Over Housing Density

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 the worry of residents is that developers will get zoning variances 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.

Complaints about newcomers usually take the form of 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, 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 Krieg, 41, is a brick mason who commutes to work in Pacific Palisades, and Renny Krieg, 37, teaches aerobics locally and helps tend to the couple’s vegetable garden, turkeys and horses.

Fear ‘Another Sylmar’

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

Acton’s attractions have long been out of the closet, ever since California 14 was completed in the mid-1970s, making the area north of Santa Clarita into the Antelope Valley more accessible. The number of people living in Acton increased from 2,686 in 1970 to 6,891 in July of 1987.

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

“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--its potential city limits as determined by county officials--already encompasses 70 square miles.

Atmosphere of Distrust

But reassurances from government officials carry little weight in Acton, where distrust is more the rule. Dick Morris, 48, a 13-year resident 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.

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

“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,” Morris said 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.”

Dave Vannatta, planning and development deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents the area, said the general plan for Acton should keep it 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, who meets regularly with Acton residents, said it is just a matter of time until they realize that they are safe from “the big developer out there they’re afraid is ready to pounce on them.”

But with housing tracts springing up throughout the area, most residents realize that Acton will never be the sleepy little ranching community that it was years ago. Long gone are the days when the one grocery storekeeper in town left a key so residents could shop unsupervised when he went fishing, said Bob Milburn, 72, a retired telephone executive whose family owns 640 acres.

‘I Knew Everybody’

“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 14 years ago, hopes that 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.”