SANTA CLARITA : City Endures Growing Pains While Seeking Shared Vision of the Future

Santa Clarita is a precocious 5-year-old now, the whiffs of smoke from its birthday candles still fresh, its moods constantly in flux.

Like Los Angeles 45 miles to the south, it has not one personality but several.

Drive all the way through the leafy, upscale community of Valencia, and you’re in Newhall, with its mix of antiquity, charm and blight, or Saugus, with its tract houses and mini-malls encroaching on its rough-hewn look. Nearby is Canyon Country, its rural scapes dotted with small, scruffy houses as well as mansions so huge that it’s easy to wonder if the owners park airplanes in their garages.

What’s more, Santa Clarita--with a population of 121,600, the seventh-largest city in Los Angeles County--comes across as not just a city of contrasts, but one also of interminable change.

It’s fifth among 25 U.S. “up-and-coming cities” ranked this month by City & State, a newspaper for state and local government leaders, based on a formula measuring growth in population, employment and property value (Las Vegas placed first, followed in order by Sacramento, Columbus, Ohio, and Glendale).

Santa Clarita is mostly a commuter, bedroom community growing rapidly even in a lethargic economy, but it doesn’t want to grow too fast--or too slowly.

This year has been a time when the City Council sent unmistakable “go slowly” signals to developers by adopting an ordinance that protects ridgelines and hillsides. A slow-growth initiative, however, failed at the ballot box in April.

And during the year, the city welcomed not only Metrolink commuter trains but also the Valencia Town Center shopping mall and a Price Club outlet to shore up revenues from sales taxes.

And while Santa Clarita scrambles to accommodate its growth--much of it hastened by refugees from Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley--the task of widening parts of San Fernando and Soledad Canyon roads, extending the Whites Canyon Bridge, refurbishing older pockets of Newhall, reshuffling municipal bus routes, laying bike paths, planting trees and building schools and parks can’t be accomplished fast enough.

No one knows better than City Manager George Caravalho the treadmill of trying to play catch-up to growth that had exploded long before Santa Clarita became a city Dec. 15, 1987-- back when the economy was so robust that many Californians could see prosperity forever.

“It’s hard enough just trying to keep up,” said Caravalho, overseer of the city’s $54-million annual budget. “But then we also must try to preserve the identities of each of our communities while providing linkages so it all makes sense.”

To Santa Clarita’s new mayor, Jan Heidt, it also makes sense to stimulate growth by rethinking the area’s economy.

“I know a lot of people in their 50s or late 40s who are out of work here,” she said, “and they’re not going to get a job, I’m afraid, because their jobs are gone forever. We have to ask ourselves, ‘What kind of an economy do we want?’

“Of course, we want the usual things like clean industries, but it’s not enough to plan for them just so we can have short-term gain--like the country has done since the 1960s. That won’t cut it anymore. We need long-range planning--in this city, in our state, in our country.”

Yet even as Santa Clarita gears up for 1993 and beyond, the city is tugged by crosscurrents as it struggles to decide what it wants to be.

Will Santa Clarita, on the one hand, cling to its mostly residential, family character, hoping also to retain or improve its rank in FBI statistics as the nation’s fourth safest city among those with populations exceeding 100,000?

Or will Santa Clarita go the way of paved-over, high-rise suburbia, attracting more traffic, noise, pollution, crime and congestion?

Listen to Winthrop Taylor, a Canyon Country resident who belongs to a community group called RURAL (Residents United for Rural American Living), whose members live on multi-acre home sites where they park not just cars or vans but horses.

His sentiments echo the anti-development fervor that gave birth to Santa Clarita--and they still ring loudly across a valley that many locals refer to simply as “out here.”

“We came out here to enjoy dirt roads and no street lights, to hear the birds in the morning,” Taylor recently told the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission, joining neighbors who oppose a proposed 40-acre commercial recreation-sports complex just outside the city limit. “We didn’t come here to smell the smoke and exhaust, or to hear honking horns, or to see derelicts try to pick your pockets every time you walk by.”

Listen to Valerie Malin, another Canyon Country resident, complain about “terrible traffic” while addressing development before the City Council:

“It used to be like the Old West out here. The problem is, you move farther out, and pretty soon you’re out in the desert. . . . I don’t want us to become like the San Fernando Valley.”

The conflict between visions of what kind of city Santa Clarita should be is important to City Councilwoman Jill Klajic, who just completed a term as mayor and who stood alone among her council peers in support of the failed slow-growth initiative.

“If the economy picks up and the developers start building all the condominiums and apartment houses that they’ve planned, we’ll no longer be a beautiful, safe, pleasant place to live,” Klajic warned. “We’ll end up having all the problems that we moved away from.”

She sat in her City Hall office amid reminders of those kinds of problems and their solutions: a “Recycle California” button, a sign reading “Say No to Drugs and Gangs” and a bumper sticker emblazoned “Save Elsmere Canyon,” a paean to the city of Santa Clarita’s opposition to a proposed landfill the city and county of Los Angeles want to operate jointly in the nearby Angeles National Forest.

“If people believe we can build our way out of these problems and that the development industry is the panacea to our economic problems in the Santa Clarita Valley, they’re going to be very wrong,” she said.

“We have to balance our economy out here--it has to be balanced on high-tech, service, commercial and industry. We can’t depend on one industry--and the development industry would be the very worst for us to depend on.”

Not so, say officials of Newhall Land & Farming Co., the area’s largest developer, which started building the master-planned community of Valencia 27 years ago. Newhall Land vigorously fought the slow-growth initiative. It is a developer of the Valencia Town Center, which opened in September and is the Santa Clarita Valley’s only regional shopping mall.

“We’ve stood for orderly--not rampant--development,” company spokeswoman Marlee Lauffer said.

“What the people of this community keep telling us,” she said, “is that they want more service industries, including restaurants, which in turn can provide more job opportunities and contribute to both our economic base and our quality of life.”

To that end, Newhall Land wants to add to the mall a fourth major department store and, later, an office-hotel-condominium complex. The company continues to expand Valencia Industrial Park, about one-third of which sits inside the city boundaries and where 14,000 jobs are projected to be available when the facility is completed.

Newhall Land is developing two other office parks--Valencia Commerce Center, with a projected 20,000 jobs, including those in a planned major U.S. Postal Service center, and Valencia Corporate Center, where U.S. Borax Inc. will relocate its Los Angeles corporate headquarters and an Anaheim-based department, moving about 300 employees to the area by the end of March.

These projects are in keeping with Los Angeles County’s general plan, which calls for the kinds of development that would encourage most residents to live and work in the area.

Santa Clarita’s own general plan, too, projects a maximum of 267,000 residents throughout the Santa Clarita Valley by the year 2010--an increase of about 160,000.

“Our general plan tells us that in 20 years we’ll have so many jobs up here that we’re actually going to have people commuting in ,” Klajic said. “I’m not sure that people really understand that or if that’s what they really want for our community.”

High on Santa Clarita’s agenda for 1993, city officials say, is forging a partnership with Los Angeles County planners so that the city and county can plot the entire Santa Clarita Valley’s future together.

By working in harmony rather than at cross-purposes, Klajic said, both sides can save significantly on staff costs, time and energy. Moreover, she said, they can perhaps mesh the wants and needs of conflicting forces to achieve a shared vision of Santa Clarita’s tomorrows.

“Somewhere we can meet in the middle,” she said, “and have the community that we all want.”

L.A. County’s 10 Largest Cities 1. Los Angeles: 3,579,600 2. Long Beach: 442,100 3. Glendale: 184,400 4. Pomona: 136,500 5. Torrance: 133,900 6. Pasadena: 133,500 7. Santa Clarita: 121,600 8. Inglewood: 112, 500 9. El Monte: 109,800 10. Lancaster: 104,700 Source: State Department of Finance (current estimates based on 1990 U.S. Census)