Northern Discontent Fuels Drive for a California Split : Secession: Alienated rural dwellers want to start anew. Despite hoopla, recycled idea is given little chance.

They’re pointing the finger again--at us, the wacky Californians. This time, however, the bull’s-eye is not Marin, Berkeley or Santa Monica. It’s Susanville, a gritty little lumber town in the wilds of Lassen County.

Susanville, population 7,000, is the epicenter of the so-called 51st State Movement, which aims to chop the Golden State in two and create a pair of new and improved Californias from the bloated and blemished behemoth we call home now.

Frustrated by their political impotence on the statewide stage, some alienated dwellers of the rural north want to divorce the rest of us and run their own show, building a leaner, more attentive government from the ground up.

The split-state idea--popularized in the north by hot-selling buttons and T-shirts--has caught the fancy of the national media. The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Philadelphia Inquirer, CNN--all have alighted here recently to dash off bulletins about the latest fever infecting the nation’s most fickle state.

“Forget the San Andreas Fault,” mused the Wall Street Journal. “California may split without it.”

Despite the mounting hoopla, the 51st State Movement is in fact a recycled version of a very old and common theme. Since the mid-1800s, dozens of secession battles have been joined in California, sparked by frustrations as diverse as deteriorating roads and rising taxes. Typically, the rabble-rousers awaken the collective consciousness about their particular peeve and then fade back into the twilight, victims of political realities and society’s short attention span.

“Clearly, this thing is going nowhere and California is not going to dissolve,” said historian Kevin Starr of San Francisco. “The national press loves it, of course, because it’s eccentric and they love anything that bashes California. . . . But it’s not going to happen.”

Such skepticism is abundant--and snugly anchored in fact. But it has not deterred the small army of dissidents mobilizing in outposts like Weaverville, Yreka, Red Bluff and Quincy. To these disenchanted Californians, splitting the state is serious business--and long overdue.

“The Russians have done it,” declared Lassen County Supervisor Jim Chapman, an avid secessionist leading the mini-revolt in Susanville. “So why can’t we?”

Under the divisionists’ plan, 27 counties of the north would be lopped off to create a new, “homogenous,” rural state of Northern California. Seizing Lake Tahoe, the vineyards of Napa and the Redwood Empire, the Iowa-sized territory would become home to 2.1 million of California’s 30.3 million people--creating the nation’s 34th most populous state.

Left behind would be “urban” California, home of gridlocked freeways, gangs, malls and all the other marvels of metropolitan life--including, incidentally, most of the industry that keeps the Golden State’s economy afloat. (A charitable bunch, the secessionists would let the south keep Yosemite.)

Unlike past split-state proposals, which usually severed California around Big Sur or at the Tehachapi Mountains, the 1991 version draws the boundary above San Francisco and Sacramento--two cities the country folks love to hate. This configuration has spawned an angry backlash among Bay Area residents, who would rather plunge off the Golden Gate Bridge than be marooned in the same California occupied by--gasp!--Los Angeles.

“Wait a minute,” moaned the Marin County Independent Journal in an editorial typifying reaction of Bay Area residents. “They put Marin in the same state as water-guzzling Los Angeles (and) . . . the white-belt, white-shoe wearing, GOP stronghold of Orange County? That’s totally ridiculous.”

While the boundaries may be debatable, proponents of the plan insist their goal of slice-and-dicing California is not. The angst that gave birth to the rural insurgence runs too deep for reconciliation, they say; separation is the only cure. Some die-hards have already begun listing their return address as “Northern California.”

The crux of the problem is money--rather, lack of it. Counties have struggled to find cash to cover welfare programs and other services mandated but only partly funded by the state. In poor rural counties like Lassen, Butte, Shasta and Tehama, officials have had to close libraries and mine the budgets of sheriff’s departments to meet their state obligations.

This fall, the picture grew so bleak in Lassen County that supervisors engaged in a bit of civic disobedience. Instead of adopting a budget that would have required “intolerable” cuts in law enforcement and other services, supervisors simply “borrowed” $1.5 million reserved for state-mandated programs. Lassen’s top administrator, Bill Bixby, said the county will run out of money and dissolve in April unless help arrives from Sacramento.

Exacerbating the fiscal woes, Bixby and others complain, is a panoply of laws passed by a Legislature controlled by city slickers who don’t give a hoot about rural California’s needs. Siskiyou County Supervisor Patti Mattingly cites the regulation requiring emission controls on gasoline pumps, noting that many gas stations in remote corners of the state were unable to afford the controls and closed down.

“That means people in areas where there’s not a station within a 100-mile radius are now forced to carry extra gasoline in their cars,” Mattingly said. “That’s more dangerous than the benzene leaks they were trying to prevent with the law.”

Another popular example repeated by the rebels is the statewide ban on open burning at garbage dumps.

“We could burn all our trash every day and not have air pollution, but because there’s a smog problem down in the asphalt jungle of L. A., we’re stuck with this regulation,” lamented Chapman, the feisty Lassen County supervisor. “So we have to operate a ‘sanitary landfill’ and our costs go from $25,000 a year to $800,000 a year today. When your county has only got 25,000 people in it, that’s big bucks.”

But make no mistake: This crusade is not rooted merely in economics. There is a sense of estrangement evident here in the wooded hills and wide open spaces of the Northland, a palpable feeling that this California has very little in common with the other California any more. Joe Champion can see the chasm, plain as day.

“San Francisco, Los Angeles--those places are worse than foreign countries to us,” says Champion, a bear of a man who owns a struggling chain saw business in Westwood, a tiny logging town near Lake Almanor. “We’re about 200 years--maybe 200 light -years--away from you people down there. Why the heck should we be in the same state?”

Why indeed, asks Assemblyman Stan Statham, a Republican from the Shasta County hamlet of Oak Run. Statham, a newscaster-turned-politician, is head cheerleader for the 51st State Movement. Like a telegenic true believer touting a miracle cure, he has been roaming the state since October, promoting his cause at Grange halls, Rotary Clubs and anywhere else he finds a willing listener. There’s a 51st State Hotline, and even a videotape, in which Statham delivers his dump-the-south pitch while sitting presidentially before a gigantic American flag.

Statham, whose nine-county assembly district is the size of Connecticut, says he is fed up with the ballooning state bureaucracy and his fellow lawmakers, whom he accuses of neglecting rural problems. Invoking Thomas Jefferson and John Locke in his sound-bite-filled speeches, the assemblyman says California is “already a divided state” and has simply become “ungovernable” in its present form.

Wouldn’t it be great, Statham asks his audiences, to start fresh? To hold a constitutional convention and create an all-new government just the way we want it?

“Northern and Southern California have been married for a long time and after all these decades, the marriage has gone irreparably sour,” Statham said in an interview. “It’s time for us to act like adults, divide the community property and go our own ways.”

Statham’s stated goal is to persuade all 58 California counties to place a non-binding advisory question on the June ballot, asking voters whether they support the split-state concept. (So far, 23 counties have agreed to hold the vote.) Statham predicts the public will overwhelmingly support his plan, delivering a mandate that will force the Legislature and Congress to approve the 51st state--the legal requirement under Article IV, Section 3 of the U. S. Constitution.

Statham’s colleagues in Sacramento, however, are of a different mind, and most have greeted his proposal with hearty chortles.

“Great idea!” Assemblyman Phil Isenberg (D-Sacramento) said. “We’re having the 51st state committee meeting along with the Flat Earth Society meeting at the next Star Trek convention.”

Others see a hidden motive in Statham’s crusade: “This is just good local politics for Stan, that’s all,” said Assemblyman Richard Katz (D-Panorama City).

Even state Sen. Barry Keene (D-Benicia)--who in 1978 sponsored a bill to divide the state at the Tehachapis--was less than enthusiastic.

“The complaints in these rural areas are very genuine,” Keene said in an interview, admitting that his bid to create “Alta California” was merely a tool to rally opposition to the Peripheral Canal. “But splitting up will not solve these problems. I feel this sort of we-they division is very unhelpful at a time when we need to be uniting on solutions.”

Naysayers like Keene are well aware that Californians have been trying to cleave their state virtually since its admission to the Union. The attempts have been so numerous, in fact, that Eleanor Smith and Michael DiLeo wrote a book about them--”Two Californias: The Truth About the Split State Movement.” According to the book, a prosperous Los Angeles rancher and assemblyman, Andres Pico, got it all started back in 1859, when he proposed creating the “Territory of Colorado” out of the counties south of Big Sur. Pico, ticked off that southerners were overtaxed and underrepresented, got his bill past the Legislature and the governor. But Congress--then coping with the events that would lead to the Civil War--took no action and the movement died.

Perhaps the most colorful of the secessionist drives was the Yreka Rebellion of 1941, which sought to unite five northern California counties with a chunk of southern Oregon in a new state called Jefferson. These rebels, mainly angry about deteriorating roads, proclaimed their independence and posted armed guards at their borders. But “Inauguration Day” was Dec. 4, 1941. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor three days later, the rebellion collapsed.

“These movements emphasize that what we call California, with the boundaries we set in 1850, is really a quite arbitrary thing,” said historian Starr, who suggests California would divide neatly into five or six distinct territories. “It would be naive to think that just because we imposed this structure on California (more than) 100 years ago, we’re not going to see these continual expressions of the state’s diversity.”

Splitting California may be a very old story, but that has not kept the media from pouncing eagerly upon it. Here in Susanville, those holding the secessionist torch have been host to a long parade of reporters since their campaign took flight in October. Supervisor Jim Chapman--who has lost count of the number of times he’s posed for photographs--keeps a thick binder of news clips that have lobbed his hometown into the national spotlight.

“It’s been a lot of fun for us,” said Chapman, a thoughtful fellow who has energized like-minded residents by producing “51st or Fight!” buttons and other campaign paraphernalia. “The problems that led us to this point are very serious. But there’s no law that says you can’t enjoy yourself during times of adversity.”

The 51st State?

Feeling powerless and neglected by their urban brethren, rural Northern Californians want to create their own state. The new territory would encompass 27 counties and 2.1 million of California’s 30.3 million residents. To succeed, the plan must be appoved by the Legislature and Congress.

Unlike past secession movements, this 51st state would exclude Sacramento and San Francisco--leaving Santa Rosa (population 114,000) as the biggest city in Northern California.

Other Secessionist Movements:

Ever since California became a state in 1850, residents have been trying to carve it up. Here is a sampling of the more memorable attempts:

1859: Andres Pico, a prosperous rancher and assemblyman from Los Angeles, proposes creation of the “Territory of Colorado” out of the counties south of Big Sur. Bill passes Legislature and is signed by Gov. Milton Latham. But Congress--then coping with the fracturing Union--takes no action.

1941: Siskiyou, Lassen, Trinity, Del Norte and Modoc counties unite with southern Oregon in the Yreka Rebellion. The rebels dub their new state “Jefferson,” post armed guards at the borders and stop paying sales tax. Three days after “Inauguration Day,” the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and the rebellion dies.

1965: State Sen. Richard Dolwig of Redwood City sponsors bill to divide California at the Tehachapi Mountains. Legislature passes Senate but dies in Southland-dominated Assembly. Dolwig persists until retiring.

1970: State Sen. Randolph Collier of Yreka urges an east-west California split. Later, Collier suggests three Californias.

1978: Barry Keene, then an assemblyman from Humbolt County, urges creation of Alta California with the border at the Tehachapis. Keene later admits his legislation was merely a tactic to rally opposition to the Peripheral Canal.