Cityhood: A Tale of Two Factions : Government: The groups may trade barbs and argue over leadership of the movement, but they still have one aim--break away from Los Angeles.

Where else but Venice would a secession movement fall prey to secession?

The eccentric seaside village’s newest drive for cityhood is off to a bizarre start--with two groups claiming to be the Venice Cityhood Organizing Committee. Each faction of the once-unified effort insists that its officers are the movement’s elected leaders. Each labels the other a breakaway impostor.

“We are the VCOC,” said William McNally, a community organizer who spearheaded the group’s formation and is a board member of the larger faction, which has 39 members. He said only his group is holding public meetings and actively planning for a cityhood proposal. The other, he said, is an idle phony composed of a handful of disgruntled castoffs.

“They have gone out and tried to portray themselves as the group when they don’t do anything. It’s a rip-off,” McNally said.

Not so, says Ellen Gifford, a Northrop Corp. manager who charges that she was elected VCOC president in August but had her title--and the group’s name and gargoyle logo--snatched away by McNally in a power grab when the group incorporated. She acknowledged that what’s left of her committee--four board members and a few volunteers--has been “on hold” in the three months since the split. She said it plans a comeback after the new year.

“I don’t know why they left the group,” Gifford said of the rival faction. “I really don’t.”

The committee basically broke apart because of clashing personalities and a struggle over who would run it--and how. The McNally group is named on official state incorporation papers, making it the legal VCOC, but Gifford said Thursday that she is planning legal action to challenge that.

Yet even amid the ill will and finger-pointing, the two groups strongly agree that after many failed cityhood efforts, the idea of self-rule for the community of 40,000 is more popular than ever.

Despite the long odds against any cityhood push, advocates say their quest is boosted by several new circumstances: heightened disenchantment with Los Angeles after the riots, the approaching reality of the massive Playa Vista development proposed next door to Venice and a nascent movement to change state law to make it possible for communities to divorce parent cities.

“From what I see, this (effort) is going to result in cityhood,” said lawyer Kenneth Kahn, a member of the official VCOC. “If we don’t do something now, we may never be able to do this.”

A survey McNally conducted last year for activist Arnold Springer’s Ulan Bator Foundation showed strong enough support for Venice cityhood among both renters and homeowners to ignite the current campaign. About 74% of the 1,239 residents who returned the mailed surveys supported Venice’s secession from Los Angeles, with about 20% opposed.

The newest movement wears the mark of a decade of local gentrification. At monthly meetings of the active VCOC, an array of professionals--engineers, urban planners, architects and lawyers--sit alongside familiar counterculture figures like boardwalk gadfly Jerry Rubin. Boosters are playing up this fresh image of cityhood.

“This isn’t a bunch of old Venice hippies,” McNally said. “This isn’t a bunch of wackos. This is a bunch of homeowners.”

Backers have glommed onto cityhood as a possible cure for everything from Venice’s cramped parking and trash-strewn alleys to overbuilding and the sense that Venice’s unique spirit is crushed by remote bureaucrats in downtown Los Angeles.

“Venice has always kind of been the stepchild,” said Frank Serafine, a composer who has joined Gifford’s group.

Folks from both camps say that sprawling Los Angeles is a dinosaur that just doesn’t work. That feeling has grown stronger since the spring unrest, say secessionists in Venice and throughout the area.

“The riots cleared the picture,” said Howard Bennett, a Wilmington activist who heads a coalition of communities in Southern California hoping to detach.

One puzzle before the cityhood activists is what to do about the Playa Vista development, which would create a mini-city on nearly 1,000 acres between Marina del Rey and the Westchester Bluffs. It offers a tantalizing target for possible annexation and future tax revenues--as well as the chance to control a nearby development. The official VCOC is studying possible boundaries--starting with Venice’s borders before annexation in 1925--and has not decided whether to sweep in Playa Vista. The committee sent a delegate Wednesday to voice traffic concerns at a public hearing of the project’s draft environmental impact report.

The idea to include Playa Vista came from Springer, a flamboyant history professor who joined McNally in launching the current cityhood drive. Beyond that suggestion, though, Springer said he is staying clear of the current campaign. His foundation paid for the $11,000 survey, but Springer said he has no plans to fund the campaign. Springer still is anathema to many activists for accepting $200,000 from developer Jerry Snyder in 1990 and forgoing a legal challenge to Snyder’s Channel Gateway development on Lincoln Boulevard.

Whatever its eventual stand on Playa Vista, the cityhood campaign stands almost no real hope of success without a change in state law to make it possible for communities to break away from parent cities--something that has never been done in California. Under current law, parent cities have effective veto power over such a move.

There is a growing young movement to band like-minded communities into a statewide lobbying force to change the law to allow communities to secede as long as they have the tax base to survive.

The California Assn. of Detaching Cities includes secession groups from Venice, Wilmington, Westchester, Eagle Rock, Hollywood and several other communities in Southern California.

“If we had the legal right to become part of the city, we should have the right not to be part of the city,” said Gifford, the cityhood activist who said her title was usurped.

Even under the best conditions, cityhood is an arduous road. If at least 25% of registered Venice voters sign petitions favoring secession and incorporation, it would go to the state-chartered Local Agency Formation Commission. Under current law, the Los Angeles City Council would have to agree on a resolution specifying the amount of tax revenue that would belong to Venice--an unlikely event--before LAFCO would rule on its financial feasibility. The proposal would proceed to the County Board of Supervisors only if it were approved by the City Council and LAFCO. It would only go to the voters if the supervisors, LAFCO and the City Council approved.

Another tack might be to challenge the legality of Venice’s annexation by Los Angeles 67 years ago, said Richard Beckwith, treasurer of the official VCOC.

The immediate task is building strong community support for cityhood. And some activists think having rival cityhood movements might actually help by getting word out to a wider audience.

“It’s like having more than one Fuller Brush salesman,” said attorney Kahn. “It’s all the same product. It doesn’t matter if you like the salesman.”

The rift at least has given residents of the fractious community a possible preview of life in Venice, the raucous city that could be.

“(Venice) is like the ultimate anarchistic democracy,” says Jack Hoffman, a real estate agent and knowledgeable local observer. “You have a two-hour meeting and it all falls apart immediately.”