Bi-County Task Force Considers Secession : Boundaries: Residents near the Los Angeles and Ventura counties border say neither pays enough attention to their needs.

They say they live in a political outback, a place misunderstood by neighboring cities and ignored by the power centers in Los Angeles and Ventura.

Angry over the lack of attention to the area between Thousand Oaks and Calabasas, a group of 60 unlikely revolutionaries met Thursday night to consider secession from Los Angeles and Ventura counties and forming a their own: “Chumash County” or “Conejo County.”

“We want to control our own local destinies and not be subject to the whims of a remote bureaucracy,” said Jim Henderson, a Westlake Village resident who serves on a bi-county task force studying the idea of secession.

He described an exchange he once had with a Los Angeles County official complaining about overgrown weeds: “ ‘Oh, Westlake Village. That’s near Castaic, isn’t it?’ ” a county official responded, misplacing the community in northern Los Angeles County. “I hear the same comments from people across the line,” Henderson said.

Thousand Oaks resident Nancy Grasmehr said, “There’s a perception that neither L.A. nor Ventura County is meeting the needs of people in this area.”

And Westlake Village Councilwoman Berniece Bennett pointed out that this string of wealthy communities in the Conejo and Las Virgenes valleys send more property tax revenue to county governments than they get back in services.

The meeting was sponsored by the Conejo Future Foundation, a Thousand Oaks research group that is assembling a report on the pros and cons of forming a third county. The report is scheduled to be completed in June.

Forming a new county is only one of eight options presented Thursday--all of them aimed at sharpening local governments’ focus on the needs of the 176,000 residents of Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village in Los Angeles County and Oak Park and Thousand Oaks in Ventura County.

Some proposals would move the county line, either east or west, so that the corridor of residents from Calabasas to Thousand Oaks is bunched in one county. Others would use existing agencies, such as the Southern California Assn. of Governments and the Local Agency Formation commissions, to make county government offices more attentive.

Group leaders from both counties are trying to act now, for fear that the state Legislature may further dilute their influence over county governments by creating regional planning agencies throughout the state.

A bill submitted in December, 1990 by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), would lump Ventura County into a regional government with Los Angeles, Orange and other counties in Southern California.

Residents on both sides of the county line have pursued the dream of forming a new county ever since the concept of Conejo County was first studied by the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce in 1983.

But Stanley A. Eisner, executive director of the Ventura County Local Agency Formation Commission, has said that given the political hurdles, a new county is unlikely and would probably not get very far in Los Angeles or Ventura.

Eisner was not invited to attend Thursday night’s meeting.

In order to form a new county, residents would first have to qualify measures for the ballots in both Ventura and Los Angeles counties by collecting signatures from at least 25% of the registered voters in the proposed new political jurisdiction, plus at least 10% of the remaining voters of both counties.

If such a measure qualifies for the ballot, the governor would then appoint a five-member panel to draw the new boundaries and make sure the new county could support itself. With the details worked out by the panel, the measure would then have to be approved by more than 50% of the voters in Ventura and Los Angeles counties.

Carolyn Kopp, executive director of the Conejo Future Foundation, acknowledged that creating a new county involves many hurdles. But, she said, it is not as improbable as it appears.

“Someone said that a year ago about the breakup of the Soviet Union too,” she said. Given the world-changing events of the past year, she said, “I think people are less reluctant to say that it won’t happen.”