Steering Toward Townhood : La Crescenta Studies Council to Keep Woes ‘Down There’

Sharon Wilson was just a toddler when her parents moved to La Crescenta 30 years ago, but she remembers the town well. “It was country, clean air, mountain living.”

She recalls children on roller skates hoisting their jackets up over their heads to catch the gusts that hurl down the steep slopes of the San Gabriel Mountains. Propelled like sailboats in a rough sea, the children dodged tumbleweeds skirting over asphalt roads without gutters and sidewalks.

Nothing much has changed in La Crescenta since, said Wilson, who is raising her own three children there. “It’s like living in the ‘50s up here.”

Residents refer to their community--an isolated, unincorporated island of Los Angeles County sandwiched between the cities of Glendale and La Canada Flintridge--as “up here.” The rest of the world is known as “down there.”

Even though changes have been gradual during the decades that La Crescenta evolved from a mountain retreat into a bedroom enclave, there is one issue on which its 20,000 residents are united: They don’t want their town to become like “down there.” They don’t want to live in a city.

‘Voice as a Whole’

To make sure, they are forming a town council. “We’ve never had any real local representation,” said Daniel J. Rendler, 27, a Southern California Gas Co. account executive who grew up on the mountainside and is also raising his three children there.

“It will be good for the community to have a voice as a whole,” said Rendler, a member of a steering committee that is forming the council. Nine members--three each from three census tracts--will be elected in March.

Residents say they are not forming the council because of any real issues within the community but because of the problems they perceive outside their borders.

“We are concerned about the things that don’t go on here,” said Sharon Beauchamp, a steering committee co-chairman and a trustee of the Glendale Unified School District, which includes the unincorporated territory. “We don’t have a major shopping area and the problems that come with it. We don’t appear to have the crime that we see in other areas.”

Even growth, which has caused adjoining areas to burst at the seams, is not a hard issue in La Crescenta, a community of largely single-family homes.

But Beauchamp and others say they are concerned about problems that know no boundaries--traffic, air and water quality, waste disposal and drug abuse.

They also want to be sure that their little town is not gobbled up through annexation by Glendale or La Canada Flintridge, even though officials of both cities deny that any such plans are afoot.

Residents in many unincorporated county areas in the last few decades have joined a statewide tide toward local rule by annexing to an existing city or forming their own. Among them are Santa Clarita, Agoura Hills and Diamond Bar.

But residents of La Crescenta find that idea backward. “We like living in the country, and we want to keep it that way,” Rendler said.

Residents say they cannot think of any services that they are lacking. In fact, they point to a low crime rate and exceptional service by the Sheriff’s Department as pluses to living in La Crescenta.

If a neighbor makes too much noise, for instance, Wilson said she simply calls the local sheriff’s station and an officer will respond within minutes to tone down the clamor.

Errant rattlesnake in the back yard? No problem, said Connie Schaefer, a 9-year resident. “I called the sheriff, and they took it away,” she said. “Where else can you get service like that?” But she quickly added, “Don’t say too many good things about us. We don’t want to get crowded.”

A town council, many agree, is the best way to maintain independence without bowing to the formality--and taxes--of a bureaucracy. The council has no real power; it cannot make or enforce laws. But it can serve as a voice of the community to be heard by those who do. “A sort of false government operation,” is the way one resident described it.

Ollie Blanning, a deputy to Supervisor Mike Antonovich, whose vast district includes La Crescenta, said town councils, which typically conjure up images of rural Eastern seaboard communities, are catching on in Southern California.

Altadena, another unincorporated area between La Canada Flintridge and Pasadena, formed its town council 12 years ago. La Jolla, an affluent San Diego resort community, also has one.

‘Time Is Right’

Blanning said the idea has been kicked around for several years in La Crescenta, but now “the time is right. We see a sense among citizens that they want to be more involved in government.” Blanning was instrumental in encouraging residents to form the steering committee this summer. “The supervisor clearly thought we needed a way to communicate with residents,” she said.

The impetus to form a town council resulted from the consolidation last year of sheriff’s stations in La Crescenta and Altadena. The jail at Altadena was closed, and all prisoners--about 10 a day--are now taken to La Crescenta. Residents, who said they feared criminals would be released in their community, complained that they were not consulted.

Those fears were unbased, said Lt. Garry Leonard, operations lieutenant of the Crescenta Valley and Altadena stations. But he said he welcomes the idea of a town council.

“The people up here really want to get involved,” said Leonard, who pointed out that the division’s reserve of 154 volunteer deputies is the largest in the county. “A lot of people don’t know that they can call the station to register a complaint or make a report,” Leonard said. “The town council can serve as an avenue for that.”

A key to establishing a successful council lies in generating sufficient community support, Rendler said. With only voluntary financial support and no formal government backing, the steering committee is concentrating on a publicity campaign and a mailing to inform residents about the upcoming election.

Goal of 20 Candidates

Steering committee members are hoping that at least 20 council candidates will surface during the filing period to be held Jan. 12-14. Three council members plus an alternate will be elected to represent each of three U.S. Census tracts in the community. Applications will be accepted at the Montrose/Verdugo City Chamber of Commerce, 3808 Ocean View Blvd., Montrose.

The eventual members of the town council will serve a community that is only a finger of land in the Crescenta Valley, which descends out of the San Gabriel foothills between the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys and nestles between the majestic Verdugo Mountains and San Rafael Hills.

On a clear day, Santa Catalina Island can be seen from the upper reaches of the valley, which overlooks downtown Glendale from elevations ranging from 1,225 feet to 3,600 feet.

While cities have grown up around them, La Crescenta residents have clung to the idea of no-rule. “We like living in the country. We don’t need a city and its taxes,” said Rendler, who has spent the last 20 of his 27 years in the area.

Typically, areas are annexed to a city at the instigation of residents or landowners in the unincorporated area. The boundaries of Glendale have been redrawn 67 times because of annexations or deannexations since the city was incorporated 1906.

But the normally reclusive residents of La Crescenta have staunchly fought off all attempts to lump them into one or another of their neighboring cities.

Part of Community Annexed

Half of the mountainside community--the area west of Pennsylvania Avenue--was annexed to Glendale in 1952 when residents there sought improved streets, sidewalks and storm drains.

But residents in the other half, east of Pennsylvania, staunchly clung to their independence.

Voters in the neighboring communities of La Canada and Flintridge also embraced cityhood in 1976, leaving only portions of La Crescenta and Montrose in unincorporated isolation.

But the landscape has changed from the humble vineyards, resort hotels and Craftsman-style stone houses that dotted the mountainside in the early 1900s. Residential neighborhoods emerged with the close of World War II and the ensuing population boom.

Then the anonymity of the community disappeared with the opening of the Foothill Freeway in 1972 and the completion of the Glendale Freeway in 1978.

Land values have nearly doubled in the last decade. Investment in real estate is booming, say local homeowners and brokers. Older homes on large lots are being remodeled or knocked down and replaced with several new homes.

“We live in a little sheltered world up here,” said Beauchamp, the leader of the town council movement. “We have to become more aware of what is going on around us.”