Southern California Towns Unite in Fight for Independence : Detach: Five cities join forces in an attempt to further their individual bids to break away from Los Angeles and San Diego.

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

And detach is exactly what he wants his town, Wilmington, to do from Los Angeles. So do some activists in San Pedro. And in Venice. And in Westchester. It’s also what some in La Jolla have been trying to do for two decades, from San Diego. The concept is simple: those who raise the revenues keep the revenues.

Their tax base, the activists argue, should be used 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. “But Los Angeles would absolutely say no.” And therein lies the rub.

But 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 will gather in La Jolla on Saturday for a strategy meeting.

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 is tired of surfing in polluted water, sitting in gridlocked traffic, and bottoming out on the potholes marring La Jolla’s streets.

A 1990 poll conducted for the La Jolla Light, the local newspaper, found that 40% of 500 respondents in La Jolla wanted to see the city incorporate. About 64% said they wanted a commission formed to study incorporation. Figures for the other areas were unavailable.

Ferradas has volunteered in the past for Incorporate La Jolla, a group that grew out of the two-decade effort to form a separate city out of the wealthy San Diego suburb.

After volunteering for a pro-incorporation group, Ferradas 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 looking to Northern California for more little towns eager for divorce.

“The first step is to get these towns together. 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,” he said.

Changing laws or making new ones isn’t easy, Ferradas concedes. He estimates it will cost about $500,000.

Ferradas--who runs an import-export trading company--may be the idea man, 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 revenues won’t storm city halls in a mad rush for independence.

“This is our plan,” Bennett said. “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 autos 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,” Bennett said. 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.

“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. . . . That is why new cities should be formed, so they can sit down and make changes.”