Task Force Seeks 5th All-Valley Council Member : Redistricting: Business leaders voice a familiar complaint--that the lack of local representation has meant less funding.

An old rebellion is alive again in the San Fernando Valley, led by Chamber of Commerce officers and small-business people who say the Valley doesn’t get its fair share of city services or attention.

“There’s always been a cultural bias against the Valley,” said Jim Stewart, a Panorama City video company owner and a leader of the Task Force For Our Fair Share. “And it has filtered into how city resources are allocated.”

While an earlier generation of dissidents called for the Valley to secede from Los Angeles, Task Force members favor a more practical cure. They want the problem corrected when the Los Angeles City Council redraws district boundaries, a process that must be completed by July 1, 1992.

With 1.2 million residents amounting to nearly 35% of the city’s population, according to the 1990 U.S. census, the Valley should have one-third of the council’s 15 districts, the Task Force says. Currently, four council districts are wholly within the Valley and four others stretch over the Santa Monica Mountains to include portions of the southern Valley.

“We’re going to make a difference,” vowed Task Force Co-Chairwoman Ann Whiteman of Northridge, a former president of the Mission Hills Chamber of Commerce and a director of the San Fernando Valley Board of Realtors.

The Task Force has many complaints, but its claims--and the arguments of those who oppose creating another all-Valley district--are typically driven by beliefs that in some cases have not been tested and do not appear to be supported by hard facts.

The lack of a fifth all-Valley district has contributed to the Valley’s failure to acquire its fair share of transit dollars, police or roadwork improvements, the Task Force maintains.

“We’re a third of the city, but we don’t get one-third of the police,” Stewart said. Eighteen percent of the city’s police officers--1,475 out of 8,300 citywide--are assigned to the Police Department’s Valley Bureau. Los Angeles police say they allocate resources based on many factors, including crime levels, and not simply by a formula based on population.

“And everybody’s getting a piece of the transit pie but us,” Stewart said. He cited the lack of a Valley light-rail or Metro Rail line and said the Valley only recently received approval for its first loop shuttle bus.

The city recognizes in myriad ways the logic of a unified Valley that ends at Mulholland Drive, Stewart said. For instance, he said, the Police Department’s Valley Bureau and the city’s community planning units, which seek to lump together areas with mutual characteristics, all stop at Mulholland Drive.

Yet the goal of creating a fifth all-Valley district seems on a collision course with political realities, including the apparent lack of support among council members with all-Valley districts. Many council members contend that the Valley benefited from a 1986 redistricting plan that pushed portions of three more council districts into the Valley.

Those most recent part-Valley seats are held by Council President John Ferraro and Councilmen Zev Yaroslavsky and Michael Woo. A fourth part-Valley district, represented by Marvin Braude, was slightly modified in 1986.

Ferraro and Councilman Hal Bernson--the only all-Valley member of the council’s recently established Ad Hoc Committee on Redistricting and a man who had his early political roots in the Valley secessionist movement--are among those who believe the 1986 plan helped because it raised to eight the number of council members representing areas of the Valley.

“I think it has worked well for the Valley,” Bernson said recently. “It has given the Valley greater strength. We’ve got eight.”

Pressed to offer an example of how the Valley has gained, Bernson and Woo--another supporter of the status quo--cited the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan, a growth-control measure that they said was processed quickly and approved at City Hall because the Valley’s legislative bloc is so large.

“I wouldn’t have been that interested in the plan if 20% of my district wasn’t in the Valley,” said Woo, who was a major player in prodding city staff members to complete the plan. Homeowners along Ventura Boulevard, however, repeatedly complained that the plan took too long to finish.

Task Force members believe that the four lawmakers who have only small portions of the Valley in their districts have more allegiance to the larger portions of their district south of Mulholland Drive, Stewart said. The 1986 redistricting shattered the integrity of communities and failed to bring government closer to the people, he said.

Under the 1986 plan:

* Yaroslavsky, who resides four blocks from Melrose Avenue and 10 blocks from the heart of the Fairfax District and whose political base is on the Westside, began representing parts of downtown Van Nuys.

* Woo, a Silver Lake homeowner who was first elected to the council in 1985 with a plan to revitalize Hollywood in the heart of his district, was assigned parts of Sherman Oaks.

* Ferraro, who lives in sedate and affluent Hancock Park and has always represented a mid-city area that straddles the Miracle Mile, saw his district changed to include North Hollywood.

“The Valley was splintered,” Dayle Bailey, a Valley businesswoman and co-chairwoman of the Task Force, said of the 1986 plan’s effect.

“If a councilman is living in Hancock Park, we just don’t feel they’re going to be concerned about parking restrictions--or what have you--on Ventura Boulevard,” Bailey said. “We want more people like Joy Picus, who live in the Valley. She physically comes out to the Valley. She’s touchable. We don’t feel that way with those who live on the other side.”

The Task Force’s strategy for building support for its redistricting plan is simple: to send representatives to meet with and persuade organized Valley-based community groups that have influence with local lawmakers--such as the chambers, senior groups and homeowner associations--to join their cause, Whiteman said.

The Valley’s United Chambers of Commerce, which has delegates from 21 chambers in the Valley, voted unanimously recently to endorse the proposed fifth all-Valley district.

Perhaps the biggest impediment to a fifth all-Valley district could be the council’s reluctance to upset the life of one of its members. None of the four part-Valley lawmakers lives in the Valley. The city requires council members to live in their districts, which means someone would have to move.

Tongue in cheek, Councilman Ernani Bernardi said of the proposal for a fifth all-Valley district: “It would be interesting to see which one of the four who now represent only parts of the Valley would be overjoyed to move their home and whole operation into the Valley.”

Los Angeles history suggests such changes also can be politically damaging. In the reapportionment plan of 1964, for example, the council moved the entire 12th District from the central city to the Valley, putting incumbent John Cassidy at grave risk.

While the law allows an incumbent to continue serving a district in such circumstances, it requires them to move before seeking reelection. So Cassidy moved into his Valley-based district--and promptly lost to a longtime Valley resident.

Councilman Richard Alatorre, who has crafted redistricting plans for the state Legislature and the council, also warns that the fifth district idea must be subordinated to a higher imperative.

Alatorre, who has been named to the panel that will initiate the redistricting debate, said the top goal of reapportionment in the Valley will be to comply with the federal Voting Rights Act, which, he believes, will require that a Latino-dominated district be set up in the Valley.

Bernardi’s 7th District, which includes Sylmar and Arleta-Pacoima, already is 63% Latino, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau and the city. But Bernardi’s district still must be reshaped to form a critical mass of Latino registered voters sufficient to play the dominant role in the 1993 7th District election, Alatorre said.

“I think Bernardi’s district needs to be made better” for Latinos, said Alatorre, a Latino himself.