Reseda Man Is Waging Secession Campaign to ‘Save California’

It’s no secret that many proud residents of the San Fernando Valley want to secede from the rest of Los Angeles, what with all the slights they’ve endured from their neighbors to the south.

And, of course, there is the movement to split the state in half, so Southern California can be a government unto itself (and still one of the biggest in the nation).

But Reseda resident Robert L. Bell, 32, has a different idea. He wants the entire state of California to secede from the rest of the country, and he’s mounting an effort to do just that. He fancies himself a modern-day equivalent of our founding fathers, that rag-tag bunch that fought off an invading army and declared this land a nation unto itself more than 200 years ago.

Bell’s weapon of choice this time around isn’t muskets and cannon fire; he doesn’t even expect a war--at least one with weapons. He prefers the ballot to the bullet, and he’s gathering signatures for what he calls the “California Independence Initiative,” to establish the Golden State as an independent republic.

“It’s a real joke,” one state official was quoted as saying recently about Bell and his quest, “but the guy’s dead serious.”

Is he ever.

“We can, and must, save California,” Bell exhorts in his two-page “Citizens for California’s Independence” manifesto. He has been mailing the flyer describing his ballot quest to everyone he can in recent weeks--including more than 250 newspapers, radio and TV stations up and down the state--and has done countless interviews and appeared on as many talk shows as will let him. When he’s not working as a driver for a Van Nuys office supply company, that is.

On Wednesday, while taking a breather from the driving business, Bell said he is working 10 hours a day for the company and that he can only campaign at nights and on weekends. He has virtually no funds, and says he has sent a letter to Ross Perot asking for $5 million in support to mount a grass-roots campaign to get the 615,958 signatures he needs by Aug. 5 to get the measure on the ballot.

In the four weeks he has been pushing the measure, Bell says, he has collected several thousand signatures, but has not counted them yet. Although the proposal is mighty short on details, Bell says he has garnered support in communities from Eureka south to San Diego, where volunteers are spreading the word and gathering signatures.

For now, however, Bell’s is a campaign waged on a shoestring. Married, with no children, he remains convinced he is behind an idea whose time has truly come.

“California’s population has grown too large, and its needs are too complex to continue being governed by a President and a Congress 3,000 miles away,” his petition flyer says. “ . . . The only way to save California is to remove the ties that are binding it to the very causes of its economic and cultural decline.”

Specifically, Bell wants to exempt California from the North American Free Trade Agreement, and wants to sharply limit immigration in the state. He also wants to rescind a policy that allows the children of undocumented workers who are born in the United States to automatically become citizens and reap all the benefits that come with it.

Bell says he got the idea for the initiative after the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, was passed. He said passage of NAFTA was the last straw in what he perceives to be an effort to usurp California’s mighty economic power for the good of citizens of other states and the rest of the world.

Bell also says that if California were to secede, its residents would not have to pay an estimated $128 billion in federal income taxes, but that the money can be put back into the new nation’s coffers for programs to help the state and its residents.

Under the ballot measure, California law would become the supreme law of the land, and the governor would become president, with both houses of the Legislature taking the place of Congress. But all federal employees--including the state’s congressmen and two senators--would be sent packing and looking for work, he said.

Bell says the U.S. Constitution does nothing to prevent states from seceding if they want to establish their independence. Those states that sought independence during the Civil War went over the line into illegal and unconstitutional activity, he says, when they decided to form a confederacy, which drew opposition from the powers that be and resulted in one of the nation’s bloodiest struggles.

Like any other proposal to lower taxes, Bell’s proposal is sure to gain some support. “I am totally confident,” he says, “that if I got the initiative into the hands of every California registered voter that it would qualify for the ballot.”

Bell may want to work on his politics, however. He says he’s a registered Independent, and even planned to vote for Perot in last year’s presidential election until the Texas billionaire dropped his campaign and later jumped back into the race.

“I didn’t vote for Perot,” he says. “When he came back, I thought he was just too unstable.”

That being the case, maybe Bell should ask someone else for the $5 million, or learn from the old political adage that if you don’t have something good to say about somebody, don’t say anything, or make something up.