Laguna Hills Must Decide ‘What Now?’

Residents of Laguna Hills, where voters narrowly rejected a bid for cityhood this month, are starting to tackle the question of where they go from here.

“We feel there is a danger if we just sit back and do nothing, because there’s the possibility that other cities will start taking bits and pieces of our area,” said Mary Anderson, president of the Laguna Hills Community Assn.

Options for the future will be discussed Tuesday night at a forum designed to allow all sides in Laguna Hills to air their views.

‘Calming of the Waters’

“Our group is getting all the different factions to come to this meeting. It’s open to everybody, and we want to seek a calming of the waters and discuss where do we go from here.”

Anderson and other community leaders in Laguna Hills said options include:

- Asking the County Board of Supervisors to create a Municipal Advisory Council for the Laguna Hills area. Such a council has elected members from a community who function as advisers to the Board of Supervisors.

- Petitioning the supervisors to create a community services district, which has more authority than a council. A community services district establishes a fund for property taxes that otherwise would go to county government. A district board, which is elected, allocates the funds for such things as street cleaning and lighting.

- Seeking city incorporation one more time. State law forbids the same area from seeking incorporation within two years of a failed effort at the polls. But the two-year ban does not apply if the area seeking incorporation is “substantially different.”

- Doing nothing and allowing Laguna Hills to remain as it is, an unincorporated area ringed by cities or cities in the making.

Anderson said doing nothing is “seriously dangerous” because “we could be annexed by Irvine or Mission Viejo or Laguna Niguel after it becomes a city.” Laguna Niguel has a cityhood election scheduled for November.

Laguna Hills has twice been involved in cityhood election proposals within the last year. Last November, Laguna Hills was proposed as part of a large city to be called Saddleback. That proposal was voted down, with most of Laguna Hills voters opposing it.

Leisure World Opposition

On June 6, voters in the area faced a scaled-down proposal for a city, to be called Laguna Hills, which included only Laguna Hills and the retirement community of Leisure World. The plan lost by only 284 votes. The massive opposition of residents in Leisure World killed the proposal, election analysis showed.

Ellen Martin, co-chairwoman of Citizens to Save Laguna Hills, which led the battle in favor of cityhood this spring, said last week that she thinks the issue will be won with another try.

“We’ve gone beyond the point of having a Municipal Advisory Council or a community services district in Laguna Hills,” she said. “If you excluded the Leisure World vote (in the June 6 election), 83% of the voters favored cityhood for Laguna Hills.”

Voters in Laguna Hills have shown they don’t want to be part of a large city but do want to incorporate, she said.

“So what we’re doing now is working to redefine the limits (of a proposed city) and coming up with one without Leisure World. I don’t know exactly when we could have this ready for the ballot, but maybe by next June.”

Robert Aldrich, assistant executive officer for the Local Agency Formation Commission, said Thursday that it is possible for Laguna Hills to have another cityhood election in less than two years. But he said a new attempt may bring up some thorny legal questions.

Definition Needed

“The Government Code says that an area cannot vote on incorporation again for two years if the area is ‘substantially the same’ as before,” said Aldrich. “But the code doesn’t define the meaning of ‘substantially the same.’ ”

Aldrich said that LAFCO, the agency that rules on eligibility for such elections, “would have to wait and see” whether a new Laguna Hills cityhood proposal would pass legal muster.

But Martin argued that omitting Leisure World, with its 21,500 residents, would leave a substantially different proposed city, with only about 24,000 residents.

Orange County Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district includes Laguna Hills, said he is open to any proposals the residents offer. He said, however, that he would carefully scrutinize any requests for a Municipal Advisory Council or a community services district to be sure “the proposals are sound.”

Riley’s executive assistant, Christie McDaniel, is among speakers scheduled at Tuesday’s forum. The meeting, sponsored by the Laguna Hills Community Assn., is open to the public. It begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Great American Savings building at La Plata Drive and Paseo de Valencia.

Others on the forum will be James J. Colangelo, executive officer of LAFCO; Newport Beach Councilwoman Evelyn R. Hart, who is also chairwoman of LAFCO, and Robert Dunek, executive director of the League of California Cities.