CITY DIVIDED : La Canada Seeks Clear Direction

Nine months after a bitter election shattered 12 years of political calm in La Canada Flintridge, the city’s leadership remains divided and has yet to set a clear direction.

While two freshmen councilmen say they are trying to pry open a closed political process and protect the affluent community’s dominant residential character, they have yet to commit to a major agenda of their own.

“My only agenda is to open things up to the people,” Councilman Chris Valente said recently, much as he did throughout last April’s election in which he and challenger Ed Phelps defeated two longtime incumbents. “I just want an open thing. Let the people decide which way they want us to go. I don’t want to be their leader. I want them to tell me what they want, and I’ll just represent them.”

Critics’ View

Meanwhile, critics of Valente and Phelps--most vocal among them the two men they defeated--contend that they are avoiding such issues as redevelopment and that the delay is threatening the city’s financial future.

“I detect the feeling,” said former Mayor J. Bixby Smith, one of the two defeated councilmen, that many residents want to “build a wall around the city. The current council, while not building a wall, has certainly moved to a more reactive government. If it breaks, you fix it. But there is no forward planning.”

With its expensive homes, model schools, low crime rate and $10-million reserve in the bank, La Canada Flintridge hardly looks like a community on the brink of ruin.

Yet City Manager Don Otterman warns that the city needs to find new sources of revenue to avoid “serious financial problems in the next four or five years.” Furthermore, the $10-million reserve is no longer producing enough interest to balance the city’s budget.

That is primarily because the city never levied a property tax and is blocked by Proposition 13 from claiming a share of the property taxes its residents pay to the county. The city is largely dependent on local sales taxes for its operating revenue.

In recent years, the city’s budget has increased by more than 30%, far outstripping any increases in sales-tax revenue, Otterman said.

Before the April election, the old council was moving gingerly in the direction of a redevelopment project to brighten the city’s upscale, but still rather dull, Foothill Boulevard business district. Had the council made an official declaration that the project was proceeding, it would have allowed the city to collect an estimated $70 million in increased property taxes over the next 40 years.

Increases in Property Taxes

When a city declares an area a redevelopment project, that move enables it to claim all the increases in property taxes in the area.

Nothing in their experience told the council members that the public would disapprove.

Since the city was incorporated in 1976, primarily to stave off threats that Pasadena and Glendale were planning to annex parts of the area, its 20,000 residents have shown little interest in local politics, seldom questioning the actions of the volunteer City Council and small city staff.

But that was changing. The public was becoming aroused apparently by a flurry of changes, including the installation of underground utility cables and revitalizing of medians on Foothill Boulevard.

“I think things were happening too fast,” Otterman said.

The issue of change proved sensitive in La Canada Flintridge. And, not long before last year’s election season, it got tangled up with an odd symbol, a historic house donated to the city by one of its founding families.

Deeded to the city by Lloyd Lanterman upon his death in January, 1987, the Lanterman house is a huge 73-year-old Craftsman-style structure packed with original furniture, historic photographs, hand-painted wall designs and a 60-year-old pipe organ.

At one point, Otterman proposed refurbishing the mansion as a combination museum and city hall to help ease the crunch at the city’s increasingly crowded storefront offices on Foothill Boulevard.

Announcement of the proposal immediately drew the ire of neighborhood residents, particularly the younger, newer arrivals on Homewood Lane, a cul-de-sac of recently built homes in the million-dollar range adjacent to the Lanterman property.

“I’ve never really been very political at all in the past, but this has been a real learning process,” said Ginny Collins, whose luxurious new house on Homewood Lane overlooks the Lanterman house.

‘Has Been So Political’

“The whole thing has been so political,” Collins said. “It’s almost like the old La Canada against the new residents. Sometimes I think the people who have been here for years think they deserve more of a say than the newer residents.”

Another Homewood resident was Phelps, who concluded after several public meetings on the proposal that the council was eager to move ahead without regard to the feelings of nearby residents.

“What happened in the old days was the council, having been around for so long, having run things for so long, they already knew what they were going to do before they got there,” Phelps said. “It didn’t make any difference what anyone said at the meeting. They weren’t going to be listening. . . . It was ‘Here, folks. This is the plan.’ ”

About that time, the city’s first grass-roots community group was also forming. Lloyd Welch, a spokesman for the Concerned Citizens of La Canada, said the group is made up of people who had not paid much attention in the past but jumped in because of events of the past two years.

It was out of that activism that the campaigns of Phelps and Valente emerged.

A 38-year-old partner in the Burbank law firm of MacCarley, Phelps & Rosen, Phelps had had little to do with city government in La Canada Flintridge. Disillusioned by the fight over the Lanterman house, Phelps announced his candidacy in January, 1988. He said he was running to protect “the quiet charming, residential integrity of this city.”

Unlike Phelps, who moved to La Canada Flintridge in 1978 and was a relative unknown when he announced his candidacy, Valente was familiar to virtually everyone in town when he launched his campaign with the slogan “the people’s choice.”

Valente had been president of the Chamber of Commerce, a one-time honorary mayor in the years prior to incorporation, the executive director of the La Canada Youth House and Community Center for 18 years, a part-time government teacher at St. Francis High School for more than two decades and president of a Santa Monica-based nonprofit company that organizes travel for teachers and students.

Valente said he was pushed into politics by frustration.

‘Good Intentions’

“I think the council--they’re all nice people, don’t get me wrong . . .--was an older group of people who really had good intentions,” Valente said recently. “But they thought they knew what was best for La Canada Flintridge. They made one mistake, though. They forgot to ask the people what they wanted. They thought they knew what was best . . . but times have changed.”

Yet, Valente and Phelps have hardly been the movers of great change. One of Valente’s major campaign issues, for example, died quietly when the council rejected his proposal to keep city offices open evenings.

Nor has either proposed any new ideas for the Lanterman house. The proposal to make it a city office was quietly dropped before the election. The council is scheduled Tuesday to consider a restructured plan to use it as a museum.

A more subtle sign of change may be that, unlike Phelps and Valente, the three veteran council members are now reluctant to talk about politics.

Mayor Joan Feehan told The Times that she would not venture an opinion on whether the political climate in the city is changing. She said that she did not think her opinion was important and that the only statements of hers that she wants to see in the paper are those she makes at City Council meetings.

Councilman Warren Hillgren initially agreed to an interview, but then canceled it. Since then, he has not returned repeated phone calls from The Times.

Councilman Edmund Krause, who with Hillgren has served on the council since incorporation in 1976, was hardly more forthcoming. He said he did not think the election symbolized any change in the city.

When pressed to outline any important issues facing the city, he said, “I haven’t really given it much thought as to what the issues are. Things are running along just smoothly as far as I’m concerned. There really aren’t any important issues that I’m aware of.”

That reticence distresses those who believe decisive steps must be taken now to protect the city’s future financial base.

‘Very Special Needs’

“La Canada Flintridge has some very special needs that are very expensive,” said John Belcher, an attorney who is chairman of the Citizens Redevelopment Advisory Committee. “We live in a foothill community. We have an extraordinary amount of deferred maintenance problems with our storm drains. . . . Every cent of redevelopment money could be spent on those alone without taking care of the problem. That’s just one example.”

Belcher’s committee was set up to advise the council on how to steer around a legal obstacle that appeared to require the city to spend 20% of its redevelopment earnings on low-income housing within the city.

In November, the committee filed a report suggesting that the city could go ahead with redevelopment without having to build any new low-income housing.

But in the wake of last April’s election and the increased scrutiny of citizens groups, the council was reluctant to move forward.

Soon after the report was issued, Phelps asked the council to scrap the fledgling redevelopment agency. Though the other members defeated the motion, they did so without discussing how to proceed with redevelopment.

At present, Otterman said, the city staff is reexamining--at the council’s request--estimates for the revenue that redevelopment would generate. But he said he does not have any idea where the plan stands or what the city will do if it does not go ahead with redevelopment.

The indecision concerns Belcher, who said he understands the need for further study on exactly how the redevelopment money would be spent but is adamant that abandoning redevelopment would be a catastrophe for the city.

‘Will Be Spent Elsewhere’

“This is the biggest issue to confront La Canada,” Belcher said. “If we don’t have redevelopment, the $67 million raised in our town will be spent elsewhere. If we take the money, it will be spent in our community. We’ll have better streets, better-looking district, better recreational facilities.”

Yet, for now, the factions that changed the politics of La Canada Flintridge see no hurry to overhaul its balance sheet.

“We want studies and careful analysis,” said Welch of Concerned Citizens of La Canada Flintridge. “I don’t think that necessarily the plan will go down to defeat, but I think they will at least approach it with more intelligence. Before they would have just rubber-stamped it.”