La Jolla Takes New Tack in Bid to Split From S.D. : Independence: Upscale enclave joins with other communities in state that dream of going it alone.

Secession, Howard Bennett says, conjures up images of marauding opportunists out to make a power grab. Detaching, on the other hand, is fair.

And detach is what some people in La Jolla have been trying to do from San Diego for two decades. It’s also what some people in Bennett’s town of Wilmington want to do from Los Angeles. Ditto in San Pedro. And Venice. And Westchester.

To all of these community activists, the concept is simple: Those who raise the revenues should keep the revenues.

Their tax base, they argue, should go to pave their streets, protect their residents and clean up their neighborhoods, not somebody else’s.

“We’re not rebelling against any government. All we want is to get our incorporation back,” said Bennett, executive director of the nascent California Assn. of Detaching Cities, which will meet in La Jolla on Saturday to strategize. “But Los Angeles would absolutely say no.” So would San Diego.

Therein lies the rub.

But now the activists have a plan to circumvent their respective city governments. Two months ago, they banded together to raise funds, hire a lobbyist and take their fight for cityhood to Sacramento. Representatives of the five communities meeting Saturday will work on that plan.

Sitting at the helm of the movement along with Bennett is 32-year-old Gonzalo Ferradas--an Argentine-born businessman in La Jolla who says he’s tired of surfing in polluted La Jolla water, sitting in gridlocked La Jolla traffic and bottoming out on potholes rivaled only by the gaping craters of Baja California streets.

Ferradas, who has been involved for several years with Incorporate La Jolla, said the wealthy San Diego suburb has dreamed for two decades of striking out on its own.

But Ferradas realized those dreams were getting nowhere, and formed the California Assn. of Detaching Cities in December. He has since found a lot of like-minded disenchantment.

“Wilmington called us a few months ago. And they’re pretty close to San Pedro. So they came to one of the meetings. And then Venice heard about this whole thing,” said Ferradas, who is now looking to Northern California for more little towns eager for divorce.

“The first step is to get these towns together,” he said. “Second is to raise some money. Then we are going to try to get the best lobbyist from the best law firm to go to Sacramento and change what has to be changed.”

Changing laws or making new ones isn’t easy, Ferradas conceded. He estimates it will cost about half a million dollars for the lobbyist.

But visions of an independent La Jolla inspire him.

“For example, take crime,” Ferradas said. “ . . . The answer from the city of San Diego is, ‘We’re understaffed.’ But you go to Solana Beach--a town that’s incorporated--and there’s no crime.”

Take the roads, he added. While the city comes to repave some every two months, others near Torrey Pines are pocked with potholes.

“It’s not like they’re not doing their job. They’re doing it, but they’re not doing it well, because they don’t live here,” Ferradas said.

That means that La Jolla business owners like himself are paying for their own security and trash cleanups. Talking to the local powers-that-be doesn’t help much, he said.

“We’re not represented. You go to the City Council. OK, they listen to you, but they have no voting power. (1st District Councilwoman) Abbe Wolfsheimer is only one vote. We spoke to the mayors of Del Mar and Solana Beach, and they said not being a city is crazy, from the point of view of services.”

Ferradas said the sentiment for incorporation in his community is widespread. A poll conducted in 1990 for the La Jolla Light, the community newspaper, found that 40% of 500 La Jollans surveyed would like to see the city incorporate. And 64% said they wanted a commission formed to study incorporation.

Ferradas, who runs an import-export trading company, may be the idea man behind the new state drive, but Wilmington’s Bennett clearly has the procedures down.

No town in California has ever de-annexed, so laws will have to be changed to allow Local Agency Formation Commissions to grant towns that right, but only if the area’s voters agree and the town can prove it has the tax base to support itself, Bennett said.

That will ensure that truly blighted areas with no revenue won’t storm city halls in a mad rush for independence.

As for those districts, Bennett pooh-poohs their ambitions for cityhood.

“We decided that we would hold these people off and keep them from raiding the bank. We want to have home rule here, and we don’t want any areas that are not qualified to go ahead and become cities and then go bankrupt,” he said.

“This is our plan. We are not a bunch of knee-jerkers down here who just want to raid City Hall and call everybody names,” said Bennett, a restorer of antique cars who formed the New Wilmington Committee in 1989 in a push for cityhood.

“We have great revenues here, but we don’t get any of it. All we know is that there are five working oil refineries in the Wilmington district. And if the city of El Segundo exists very handsomely by having only one, then Wilmington should surely be able to survive with five.”

According to Ferradas’ group, which commissioned a study last year, La Jolla is in the same boat: $7.3 million in revenue from the upscale suburb is spent somewhere else by San Diego government yearly, he said.

Both men insist their detachment drive is not vindictive. Cities are simply too big to keep up with their constituents, they say.

“Los Angeles is 27 miles away, and half the people in City Hall don’t even know there is a Wilmington,” Bennett said. “It’s terrible. We have all of the social ills here as most areas. It grew this way. It’s out of hand. I don’t think there’s enough time or city personnel to sit down and make a plan. That is why new cities should be formed, so they can sit down and make changes.”

Ferradas takes the long view of history. If you could ask the ancient Greeks, he points out, cities were never meant to be big.

“Thousands of years ago, the idea of having a city where democracy works was having a city of 20,000 people. It’s hard to have a city of half a million people. It just won’t do. The Greeks proved that a long time. In order to be a democratic town, you have to be a small one.”