COVER STORY : Fussin’ and Feudin’ : Valley cities aren’t afraid to put up their fists when their borders are at stake. Projects from card clubs to freeway extensions spur disputes.

El Monte is fighting Arcadia; Diamond Bar and Walnut are duking it out with City of Industry. San Gabriel is headed for appeals court, nobody along the borders of Pomona is happy, and Alhambra and South Pasadena have had a feud going so long, it makes the Hatfields and McCoys look like pikers.

It’s a tale of many cities, of economic growth versus peace and quiet. It’s the story of what happens when one city’s windfall is in another’s back yard.

In the San Gabriel Valley, 30 cities are squeezed ever more tightly as the population grows--more than 1.7 million now--and buffers of empty land are eyed for development.

At a time when city coffers are perilously low, the pressure to fill them sometimes sparks concern among neighboring residents that new developments will crowd them, lower property values, increase crime and traffic or compromise air and water quality.

The result? Tensions. Border disputes. Even lawsuits.

“There are more of them than there used to be and they are significantly more vicious,” said Alan Heslop, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and director of the Rose Institute of State and Local Government.

Among the most volatile of San Gabriel Valley’s feuds:

* Proposals for two card clubs in Pomona prompted four neighboring cities--Claremont, La Verne, Chino and Chino Hills-- and a citizens group to file a lawsuit demanding a full environmental impact report. Faced with a court battle, Pomona agreed.

* Diamond Bar and Walnut banded together to fight a proposed recycling plant in a portion of the City of Industry that borders both cities, committing city funds to fight the matter in court, and even ferrying residents on chartered buses to protests at Industry City Hall.

* Arcadia proposes to place a dump at an abandoned quarry on a remote finger of the city, far from Arcadia houses but bordering an El Monte residential neighborhood. In May, El Monte filed two suits against the city of Arcadia, one of which challenges the proposal’s environmental impact report.

* Residents of the San Gabriel Elementary School District voted two years ago to unify the district, build a high school and return San Gabriel students, who previously attended high school in Alhambra, to their own city. Alhambra challenged the vote in court and won, but San Gabriel appealed. Despite the unfinished litigation, the fledgling district will host its first class of ninth-graders in temporary quarters this fall.

* Spanning generations, the conflict over the Long Beach Freeway extension began in 1959, when the state proposed an extension that would have split South Pasadena in two. Alhambra, which bore the brunt of traffic that spilled from the freeway onto surface streets, favored the extension. South Pasadena vehemently opposed it. In 1973, a court injunction blocked the project on environmental grounds. The stalemate continues to this day.

These are not the only conflicts, but they typify a trend among cities to step into the ring when their borders are at stake.

It’s not so much that city borders have changed; they just seem closer than ever.

“Increasing population and development has undoubtedly generated more legal contest,” said Gil Smith, director of government and public affairs for the Southern California Assn. of Cities, and a former mayor and founder of the city of Carson.

On top of that, Heslop said, recession and budget cuts have dried up local funds. “Economic pressure is forcing (cities) into activities that are bringing them into conflict with their neighboring cities,” he said. “What is an economic asset for one community--a card club or a landfill--can be an environmental or a social threat to its neighbors.”

That, in turn, makes the neighbors ever more vigilant.

“I think you’ll see more cities join together whenever our quality of life is threatened,” said Eunice Ulloa, mayor of Chino, one of four cities that filed a lawsuit to force Pomona to do more extensive environmental impact reports before forging ahead with the card-club proposals.

Time-consuming and expensive, EIRs are the weapon of choice when one group wants to challenge another’s development.

EIRs first came into use in the early 1950s, Smith said, as a means of challenging highway routes that did not address the worries of affected cities.

In the mid-1960s, South Pasadena hired an environmental firm to do an assessment on the Long Beach Freeway extension, in preparation for a battle over the project’s impact, City Manager Ken Farfsing said. In 1970 the California Environmental Quality Act mandated the use of EIRs, and in 1973 South Pasadena sued the Department of Transportation to force them to conduct one.

Negotiations since then have been a volleyball game in which Caltrans creates draft EIRs and South Pasadena bats them back with objections. To date the city has reviewed and rejected three draft EIRs, arguing that new concerns have surfaced with each draft and old concerns were never addressed. The state Transportation Commission is scheduled to decide on the project next week; the federal Highway Administration, which would provide 85% of the funding, will decide on the project sometime later.

Glenn Watson, a municipal attorney whose Los Angeles firm represents 20 cities in the L.A. region including South El Monte, said vague environmental standards encourage that kind of standoff.

“An EIR is a document that you can’t measure with absolute precision,” he said. “It’s easy to attack something as not being adequate if there’s no precise way to measure adequacy.”

From serving on the battlefront in highway disputes, the EIR became the semiautomatic rifle of urban land disputes, used to scatter a wide range of accusations against plans seen as threatening.

The reports now cover the impact on air and water quality, housing, jobs, access to public services, transportation problems, infrastructure like roads and sewers, and most recently, noise, safety and crime, Smith said.

Nowhere in the San Gabriel Valley have so many of those factors dovetailed into one conflict than in the fight against the proposed Materials Recovery Facility in City of Industry. Nearby residents dread the noise, glare and odor they say would be a constant nuisance from the proposed 24-hour-a-day recycling and sorting center. They worry about the health impacts of dust and air pollution. They fear their property values may be dropping already, as prospective buyers grow wary of purchasing homes near what may soon be a trash behemoth. And they wonder if roads that join the cities would hold up under the strain of more than 1,000 truckloads a day.

Residents and officials from Walnut and Diamond Bar took issue with City of Industry’s preliminary environmental report, saying it failed to look for other sites, gave inconsistent statistics on truck traffic, and underestimated the noise level involved. Volunteers from both cities gathered 8,000 signatures against the project and presented them to the City of Industry.

Then in a strange twist on a political tactic more often employed by students and activists than municipal officials, the two cities jointly organized protests. On June 11, 1,500 angry residents bearing picket signs reading “Dump the MRF” and “Don’t Trash Our City” gathered near the site of the proposed facility. On June 23, 200 of them rode buses chartered by the city of Walnut to protest at a City Hall hearing.

“We thought we had to do something very drastic to bring the message to them,” said Joaquim Lim, director of Walnut’s city-sponsored MRF Task Force.

A bill sponsored by Assemblyman Paul Horcher (R-West Covina) that would have banned the MRF from within 2,000 feet of homes and forced the three cities to negotiate a joint-powers agreement, recently died. Industry officials did not return phone calls from The Times.

Another Assembly bill, sponsored by Hilda L. Solis (D-El Monte), would require a joint-powers agreement to resolve the dispute between Arcadia and El Monte over the abandoned quarry. The bill has been passed by both houses and sent to Gov. Pete Wilson.

“There are some unique situations where a legislator must intervene, because local government isn’t doing its job, or the concerns are falling on deaf ears,” said Josephine Figueroa, an aide to Solis.

Intervening in local conflicts sometimes puts legislators in the untenable situation of being asked to resolve a problem, only to be castigated for stepping on local authority when they do.

“Everybody thinks the solution to any problem is to throw it up to the state, but once the state comes up with a solution, all the local officials are all upset, because it’s another state mandate,” said Ron Brand, Horcher’s chief of staff.

Arcadia Mayor Mary Young said she, for one, resents the intrusion. “I think each city has the right to try to do what they think is right,” she said.

And attorney Watson said he doubts that forcing city councils to work together would achieve compromise.

“They squabble among themselves,” he said. “Can you imagine city council members of two cities squabbling over something on the border of each?”

Eventually, many cities look to the courts to resolve the thorniest disputes.

Interminable court battles can benefit one side or the other, regardless of the outcome.

In some cases lengthy litigation and dragged-out appeals can buy time for a city to get its program running, in the hopes that what they’ve created will be nearly impossible to dismantle if the court rules against them in the end. An example is the San Gabriel schools case.

“If the decision goes against us we will appeal,” San Gabriel school board member Barbara Bauld said as a Superior Court judge deliberated the case last spring. “It could go to appellate court, or to the Supreme Court. . . . By the time it’s finally decided, we will have our high school and be well on the way to graduating our first class.”

Other times, the slow march of the court system acts in favor of a project’s opponents.

A 1973 injunction that South Pasadena obtained against the Long Beach Freeway threw a 20-year wet blanket on the project, stalling--if not killing--plans. Money originally apportioned for the project is long gone; the state would have to come up with new sources of funding if it decides to build the freeway extension.

A host of state laws that attempt to address disputes between public agencies and cities are currently in the Legislature.

But some local politicians say cities themselves must start taking more responsibility for their actions.

“In the past, we just did our own thing,” said El Monte Mayor Patricia Wallach, whose city is fighting the proposed Arcadia dump. “We have to be good neighbors. We need to take care of each other. We are not entities unto ourselves anymore.”