Group in Santa Clarita Quietly Tackles Growth

Santa Clarita city officials and representatives of outlying communities have clashed over several subjects in the past four years, but they agreed this week on one thing: Growth is the area’s main problem.

And they vowed to do more than simply pay lip service to the problem.

“People here are activists, so I can’t imagine we’d be satisfied just to sit around and talk about it without doing something about it,” said Richard Rioux, a member of the Stevenson Ranch Master Homeowners Assn.

That consensus was reached Wednesday at the first meeting of the regional council, an informal body made up of city officials and representatives of at least 11 unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, including Castaic, Agua Dulce and Stevenson Ranch. The council also agreed to discuss solutions to other problems, including law enforcement, school crowding, traffic and relations with the County Board of Supervisors.

The council was formed to address regional issues and to improve relations between the city and the outlying communities, which became strained after the city last fall proposed including some of the communities in its sphere of influence--the first step toward annexation.

Shortly before the regional council met Wednesday, a countywide planning agency turned down Santa Clarita’s bid to extend its sphere of influence over 160 square miles of unincorporated land in the Santa Clarita Valley.

The decision by the Local Agency Formation Commission angered city officials but pleased many of the 20 or so neighborhood representatives attending the council meeting in a conference room at the Ranch House Inn near Magic Mountain. Both sides skirted the thorny topic, referring to it only as indicative of the need to improve communications.

Instead, they quietly sipped coffee and calmly agreed on the importance of discussing growth and other topics--in contrast to the acrimonious atmosphere that often characterized meetings on the city’s sphere of influence proposal. The three Santa Clarita elected officials attending the meeting--Mayor Jill Klajic and council members Jan Heidt and Jo Anne Darcy--sat in the audience on folding chairs rather than up on a dais.

The council is scheduled to discuss growth at its next meeting March 4. In the interim, a subcommittee composed of Rioux, Heidt and Chip Meyer, president of the Sunset Pointe Homeowners Assn., will draft the council’s bylaws.