Activist Revives Cityhood Effort : Politics: Arnold Springer wants Venice to secede--and take Playa Vista project with it.

Venice community activist Arnold Springer has revived the sporadic Venice cityhood movement, this time with a twist: He is urging that the multibillion-dollar Playa Vista project be included in the new city when it secedes from Los Angeles.

In a survey mailed to the beach community’s 12,000 households, Springer and his allies contend that the Playa Vista property--nearly 1,000 acres between Marina del Rey and the Westchester Bluffs--would enable Venice to become financially self-sufficient. Plans call for construction of a community with 28,000 residents, offices, hotels, stores and a marina--one of the biggest projects in Los Angeles history.

“I’m trying to give the community one final try to realize its dream of reconstituting the city,” said Springer, a college history professor and longtime activist who is noted for his wardrobe of skirts, eyeliner and dangling earrings.

Other participants in the latest campaign said they are interested not only in achieving independence and self-control for Venice, but in controlling the Playa Vista development.

“It’s a dramatic offensive maneuver, an imaginative counter stroke to the development that’s occurring,” said Thomas Pleasure, another veteran Venice activist who is working with Springer.

The $10,000 cost of the mail survey of residents is being underwritten by the Ulan Bator Foundation, the organization Springer created in 1990 with money paid by developer Jerry Snyder to get Springer to abandon a lawsuit that threatened to delay construction of Snyder’s Channel Gateway development on Lincoln Boulevard.

When he formed the foundation, Springer said one of its purposes would be to promote ties between the Westside and the Mongolian culture.

Word of the latest secession effort was greeted this week with skepticism in official circles and even by some longtime community activists. Scores of similar efforts have failed since Venice was annexed by Los Angeles in 1925.

“They’re still trying this? I thought it died,” said Michi Takahashi, a spokeswoman at the Local Agency Formation Commission, the state agency charged with approving such incorporation efforts. Under state law, Takahashi said, the city of Los Angeles would have to agree to the secession and to the transfer of property taxes to the new city.

“No way,” she said. “It’s hopeless.”

Some Venice residents who have been active in the community’s affairs voiced suspicion of Springer’s motives. Springer, who teaches Russian history at Cal State Long Beach, was one of the community negotiators on Channel Gateway. Since he cut a deal with Snyder, however, he has been shunned by some of the more conventional activists in Venice.

“This is a power play for Arnold to have the same kind of influence in Playa Vista that he had in Channel Gateway,” said Larry Sullivan, former president of the Venice Town Council and the leader of a previous cityhood campaign. “He’s trying to use the money he’s got from one sellout to up the ante.”

Springer, in a brief interview, called such charges “baseless, slanderous lies.” He said his critics are “motivated by envy, jealousy and the Fuhrer prinzip .” Asked what the latter meant, he said, “They lick the heels of their leaders.” All he is trying to do, Springer said, is to stimulate public debate about an issue long dear to Venice residents.

Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, a Venice resident, said she did not receive a copy of the survey at her home. She said she had no comment on the cityhood drive, but she repeated her criticism of Springer for accepting Snyder’s payment.

Nelson Rising, a senior partner with Maguire Thomas Partners, the developer at Playa Vista, said only that if Playa Vista were ever to be seriously considered as part of a new city of Venice, “obviously as a property owner we’d have something to say about it.”

Residents are asked to return their surveys to the Ulan Bator Foundation by Feb. 7. Results will be tabulated by Springer and his associates and made public in the first edition of Ulan Bator’s newspaper, called the Voice of Ulan Bator. The foundation will also hold a community forum on the survey, Pleasure said.

Pleasure said he is handling calls from the media in an attempt to keep public attention on the survey rather than on Springer, which he acknowledged was a difficult job. “Have you seen how he dresses?” Pleasure asked.

But like Springer, Pleasure is also colorful and a longtime Venice character. In the ‘60s, Pleasure said, he decided to change his name from Paine--handed down from the American Revolutionary patriot and writer--”to get into pleasure.”