La Jolla Transplant Finds Jewel Has Its Flaws; His Rallying Cry Is ‘Secession!’

Wandering the scenic streets of La Jolla one sunny February day, the dentist from Long Island was struck by the beauty of the magical place that seemed so far from the noise, pollution and foul weather back home.

It was 1983 and Gerald Massimei had left a professional seminar behind for a sightseeing tour of the wealthy Pacific Coast enclave that so many of his Eastern friends had told him about.

His mouth, he recalls, remained open most of the time.

“It was the middle of winter, and there were palm trees and bright sunshine,” he said. “I kept stopping the rental car just to marvel at the flowers in bloom and the landscaped lawns.

“To a New York boy, that was impressive. Back home, it was 10 degrees below freezing. If you shouted at your neighbor, he wouldn’t hear what you were saying until it thawed out in the spring.”

So Massimei retired from his Farmingdale dental practice and moved his family west to behold full time the kind of American paradise he had dreamed about as a boy in Brooklyn.

But it wasn’t long before the inspired eyes of the tourist became the critical eyes of the local resident. Soon, Gerald Massimei began to recognize flaws in the jewel.

He saw potholed intersections without proper lighting and city cleanup crews that were months behind schedule in removing debris from littered streets and beaches. What he didn’t see, however, were enough police or garbage men--or enough city inspectors to remove illegal signs that appeared almost everywhere.

“La Jolla is literally fraying at the edges,” said the 48-year-old Massimei, a Town Council trustee and head of the La Jolla beautification committee. “And with so many other areas to worry about, the city of San Diego just can’t do enough to take care of it properly.

“There’s financial problems and manpower cutbacks, people constantly talking about cutting back services. And it’s only going to get worse.”

Massimei and a handful of other Town Council trustees say they have a solution. If La Jolla could only incorporate, they reason, residents could actually take care of themselves, pay their own bills, hire their own police officers--and crawl out from under the skirt of the San Diego City Council forever.

Around La Jolla these days, there’s renewed talk of making San Diego’s crowned diamond an independent entity as a way of restoring what many locals call one of San Diego County’s greatest coastal treasures.

As he removed his aviator glasses and settled back into a restaurant booth at La Valencia Hotel in downtown La Jolla, Massimei looked every bit the native Southern Californian--not the Italian boy from New York who spent his youth learning how to fight on the rough-and-tumble streets of Brooklyn.

For some locals, he’s an outsider who’s inspired a new fighting spirit. “People are talking,” he said with a smile. “They’re using words like de-attachment and de-annexation and . . . “

Then he paused and whispered the very idea that some La Jollans have dreamed of proclaiming for decades.

“ Secession ,” Massimei said.

On Saturday, the married father of two teen-age boys sponsored a meeting at the public library on Draper Street to discuss whether an incorporation drive is indeed the answer. At his own cost, he circulated more than 600 flyers that proclaimed, “La Jolla is in trouble. . . . Is incorporation the answer?”

Talk at the meeting explored initiating a study to see whether La Jolla has the tax base to pay its own way--and how locals could raise up to $20,000 to pay for such a study.

Massimei knows that the road to incorporation is littered with the wreckage of previous pipe dreams. Three years ago, for example, a poll of the Town Council’s 1,200 members showed that more than half favored incorporation. But other than a few meetings, nothing more was done to further the idea.

“The idea comes up every five years or so,” said Massimei, a La Jolla Shores resident who recently became a Town Council trustee.

“People talk about it and that’s about it. I hear the frustration in their voices about not being in control of their destiny because of the shadow of San Diego looming overhead. People think they pay out more in taxes than they get back in services.”

Most La Jollans have the perception that the San Diego City Council considers them to be “a town of the filthy rich” that can afford to provide the financial backup for less-fortunate areas of the city, he said.

“They think that the idea in San Diego is ‘Let them eat cake,’ ” Massimei said. “And residents wonder, ‘Would we be better off if we incorporated?’ Well, I’m going to find out.”

Mike Townsend, a former La Jolla Town Council president, has endured more than one incorporation debate within the nonprofit civic association. He has read too many letters in the local weekly newspaper from newcomers who time and again raise speculation of La Jolla becoming independent from San Diego.

But, with Massimei, he says, there finally is the drive to take the idea past the talking stages.

“This will be the attempt to end all speculation,” he said. “This time, we’ll put the issue to bed. There won’t be any more point talking about it because we’ll already have dealt with it.”

Regardless of what is found by any feasibility study, veteran La Jolla political insiders acknowledge that incorporation will be no easy task. “Towns in outlying areas incorporate all the time,” Townsend said.

“But rarely has a neighborhood withdrawn from a city and then incorporated on its own. The last time that happened in California was in 1883 in Coronado. It just doesn’t happen that often.”

One reason is that state law gives cities the right to scuttle any reorganization efforts if they think the move would be detrimental to the entity, Townsend said.

“So instead of going to any San Diego City Council members, getting any hair ruffled over what could be, we’re first going to find out if incorporation is viable,” Massimei said. “We’re going to hash it out among ourselves.”

Two weeks ago, Massimei and Rob Whittemore, La Jolla Town Council president, met with the county Local Agency Formation Commission, which must approve any incorporation, to learn how to get the independence ball rolling.

Mike Ott, the group’s assistant executive officer, conceded that he wasn’t very encouraging. “We really discouraged them from spending too much time and energy on the idea before they could get a reading from the City Council,” he said.

Lisa Gonzalez, an aide to Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer, whose district encompasses La Jolla, said the incorporation efforts are still too fledgling to be concerned about.

“It’s a popular idea to kick around--Rancho Bernardo, even North City West, has considered it,” she said. “Any community that’s concerned about growth and getting their fair share brings it up.

“But it’s not so easy for a small city to stay afloat. Look at Imperial Beach and all the troubles they’re having.”

Massimei, however, says there are finance questions he and others want answered concerning La Jolla’s relationship with San Diego.

For instance, how much of the parking fines and hotel room taxes collected by the city in the wealthy resort area go to finance refurbishments in other neighborhoods?

Meanwhile, the locals have numerous examples of how police and cleanup services have suffered in La Jolla. Residents are afraid to walk the beaches at night, with the drinking and rowdyism--there just aren’t enough police on patrol, Massimei said.

And city cleaning crews took two months to remove palm fronds that had accumulated in front of a neighbor’s house despite repeated calls, he said. The reason? Staff shortages, he said.

Townsend said a recent program sponsored by downtown merchants on Prospect Street purchased dozens of trash containers for the commercial drive. But, because of cutbacks, the city told merchants they would have to remove several of the new garbage cans because there wasn’t enough manpower to empty them regularly.

Illegal signs have become another issue for La Jollans when they talk of the quality of city services. Despite the most restrictive ordinance in the county, illegal signs continue to plague the area because of a shortage of inspectors.

“There’s a lot of hard-working city employees that do a great job,” Massimei said. “But all they can do is raise their hands. They’re simply out-manned and under-funded.”

Jan Rowland, a senior investigator in the sign permit division of the city’s Planning Department, said cutbacks forced her department to go six months without inspectors last year.

“We’ve had no enforcement since last July,” she said. “La Jolla residents who called were told that they just had to wait in line to have their complaints looked into. But we’re getting back up to speed now. And we’ll be back on the streets.”

La Jolla insiders say, however, that one recent snub from San Diego did the most to fan the incorporation fires.

Despite months of research to find a European sister city--efforts that included a trip to each of three possible cities in France, Italy and West Germany--San Diego told La Jolla Town Council members they could not establish their own formal ties with foreign cities.

The city’s International Affairs Board ruled that, as a neighborhood of San Diego, La Jolla had no business conducting international affairs.

“La Jolla is the fifth-most-popular tourist draw to San Diego,” Massimei said. “We feel we have an identity, and we want to project that to the world. But San Diego feels that we’re just a neighborhood, a younger sibling, and that it’s better for them to establish the liaisons.”

In the end, says Town Council Manager David Ish, the time seems to be ripe for an incorporation effort. But serious questions remain, he and others caution.

Without any industrial base, could the new city muster the taxes to contract for services such as police and fire protection?

And what about insurance? One lawsuit resulting from a personal-injury accident along the jagged shoreline, for example, could bankrupt the fledgling city, they say.

“Control of one’s own destiny within the political framework is appealing,” Ish said. “Within a burg of 35,000, people would feel a lot closer to City Hall and not lost in the shuffle of a bigger city.

“But what about down the line? What quality services could we as a city provide? There’s just so many dangers, so many blind corners.”

Massimei has his own doubts about the incorporation effort.

“Sometimes I think that it doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of succeeding, or whether it’s even the best idea for the city,” he said. The feasibility study, he says, “is a double-edged sword that cuts us both ways.”

“Because, if we find that La Jolla pays more than its share of taxes to San Diego, the city will never let us leave the fold. But if a study tells us that we get more services for our taxes, people will have doubts about trying to make it on our own.”

Regardless of the outcome, some good will come from La Jolla’s renewed community activism, he said.

“We’re going to get the Town Council fired up to become a more dynamic group,” Massimei said. “We’ll become a stronger lobbying voice on our own behalf at City Hall. And that will be healthy for everyone.”

But suppose this talk of secession becomes a reality, that La Jolla beats the odds to become the first neighborhood in California in more than a century to pull off its own independence?

What then, would the future hold for Gerald Massimei? The mayor’s office, perhaps?

“Not for me,” he said with a wave of the hand. “It would take too much time away from my family. But I would like to think that I made some beneficial things happen here.

“Maybe I could just be remembered as the guy who got things started.”