SANTA CLARITA / ANTELOPE VALLEY : Santa Clarita’s New Mayor Outlines Her Goals for Year

Jo Anne Darcy began her second stint as Santa Clarita’s mayor Tuesday night, stating her goals for the upcoming year and urging residents to become more involved in local issues.

“Your participation . . . will spell the difference between our success and failure as a community,” Darcy said, after receiving the council gavel from outgoing Mayor George Pederson and a standing ovation from about 100 residents.

Darcy, 62, presented a list of 10 goals she wanted to pursue in her first 100 days as mayor. They include appointing citizen advisory panels for the city’s redevelopment agency, developing revitalization plans for the east Newhall and Canyon Country areas, creating a youth master plan, planning an east-west traffic corridor and launching business incentive programs.

“It’s going to be a hard year,” said Darcy. “We’ve got some things we’ve got to get moving on.”

The Santa Clarita mayor’s job goes each year to the council member who got the most votes in the last election, but the mayor has no more formal authority than the other council members. The mayor does chair the biweekly council meetings, however, and makes ceremonial appearances.

Councilman Carl Boyer was named mayor pro tem Tuesday, as next in line, he will serve as mayor in 1996.

Darcy was first elected to the council when the city incorporated in December, 1987. She also serves as a field deputy to Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich.

Darcy was decisively reelected in April to her third City Council term. More than half of the 10,252 voters cast one of their three ballots for her, and she was the top vote-getter in 40 of the city’s 51 precincts and among the absentee ballots.

Pederson, 70, will continue to serve on the council. His mayoral term was dominated by the Northridge earthquake and Santa Clarita’s efforts to recover from it, including the creation of a controversial redevelopment plan that has been bogged down in legal challenges.

“It has been a very active year,” said Pederson. “The most important thing was trying to ensure that this community felt and knew that the city was working hard for them.”

Pederson’s efforts included manning phone banks that were set up in Santa Clarita’s quake-battered City Hall, working alongside city workers who had been displaced from their offices.