SAN GABRIEL VALLEY / COVER STORY : Taking Control of the Streets : Frustrated residents of an unincorporated island at the edges of Monrovia, Arcadia and Duarte form a town council to get the county to provide basic services.

Until a year ago, few people dared use Pamela Park for recreation.

Overrun by gangs and crack dealers, the park and an adjoining street exemplified the kind of neglect that prompts complaints from residents of many unincorporated areas.

The county island, wedged among the borders of Monrovia, Arcadia and Duarte, existed in a kind of municipal no-man’s-land. Aside from the county, residents had no local authorities to turn to when problems arose. And they had too few law enforcement officials to control the criminal underworld that had grown up like weeds around Pamela Park.

“This area was saturated with violence,” said Sheriff’s Deputy John Rodriguez, who has patrolled the neighborhood around the park on and off for 10 years. “We had murders, drive-by shootings, rapes--everything that comes along with crack cocaine use.”

Now schoolchildren play at the park, which formerly was the exclusive territory of Crips. These days, kids drop in after class to play basketball, shoot pool or spar at boxing with sheriff’s deputies who run a recreation program on the site.

One of the main reasons for the change: In June, 1993, residents formed a town council--a body of seven residents who serve as a liaison between citizens and county agencies and who work to get everything from stop signs to extra sheriff’s officers for their community.

There are 15 to 20 identifiable unincorporated areas in the San Gabriel Valley. Some are as small as a few blocks, stranded inside a city’s borders. Others, like Altadena and Hacienda Heights, are home to some 50,000 people and span areas the same size as--or bigger than--their neighboring cities.

Residents of some areas seem pleased with the service they get from the county. But more often, residents of county islands complain of governmental neglect. They cite potholes in the streets, lack of control over planning issues. As one small corner of a vast county, they say, they have no clout with the people who govern them.

And in a few cases, residents have decided to take some measure of control over their streets with quasi-governmental town councils, like the one in Monrovia-Arcadia-Duarte--known by its initials, MAD. Since its formation, the unincorporated area, home to about 11,000 residents, has increased sheriff’s patrols, opened its new recreation program, resurfaced streets and lighted them.

But before the town council was started, the area’s acronym fit it well.

Juventino Ferrel, a resident of the MAD area, pointed to his property tax bill as he surveyed the muddy, potholed street in front of his house on Camino Real east of California Avenue. Only a few chunks of asphalt remain on what is now essentially a dirt road.

“I pay $1,400 in property taxes,” he said. “For nothing. They don’t serve the streets here. When it rains, there’s water, and for a month it doesn’t dry. You could see fishes here.”

Council member Joan Schmidt said that before the town council stepped in, residents on those blocks were told they would have to pay an additional fee to get their street paved. But now it is scheduled for resurfacing through a county grant the council received.

“There were all these county programs available but there was no one to tell people about it,” Schmidt said.

The $2.7-million grant has funded lighting, street resurfacing and home improvement grants to help residents bring their houses up to code, said David Hall, chairman of the town council. Other achievements of the council include establishing a dial-a-ride program and negotiating better waste disposal services.

But the changes began with concerns about crime and with the efforts of two officers from the Temple City Sheriff’s Station, Capt. Bob Mirabella and Sgt. Sammy Jones.

Mirabella set the ball rolling in December, 1992, when he called a community meeting in conjunction with the local chapter of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People to air complaints about sheriff’s services. Before then, Hall said, many residents distrusted sheriff’s officers, who they felt were overly aggressive and confrontational toward residents.

The idea of forming a town council came up at the meeting. Jones and Mirabella helped residents figure out the formalities of setting it up, and Jones attended all of the meetings during the initial stages.

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With the help of town hall leaders, the two officers instituted a dual policy of cracking down on crime and forging ties with the law-abiding members of the community.

The town council and sheriff’s station landed county grants that enabled them to hire three extra officers, bringing the total from two to five, and to open a recreation center at the park, said Deputy Dave Flores.

One of those officers runs the recreation center. Others patrol the streets. They also worked to get the local gang, the Westside Du Roc Crips, declared a terrorist street gang, Flores said. That allows courts to slap gang members with an extra two to four years of prison time on any future felony convictions.

The key to those efforts, Hall said, was that community members, from gang members to grandmothers, got to know the officers, “by name and by face.”

The approach has paid off with a 30% drop in serious crimes in the MAD area over the past year, according to the station’s reported crime statistics.

“Before the town council was formed you couldn’t pay me to come here,” Schmidt said while driving toward the park down the two blocks of Goodall Street that he said are home to many of the area’s gang members and crack dealers. “There was blatant drug-selling in the middle of the street.”

“When we got the funding for this program, we came by and let them know this is going to be our park, we’re taking it back,” said Ruben Martinez, the program’s director.

Not all neighbors are satisfied, though.

One resident who lives across the street from a crack house on Goodall Street in the MAD area said she’s seen little improvement. During the past year a shotgun blast shattered a window in her house. Vandals blew up her mailbox. She’s watched women she believes are prostitutes stroll the street late at night.

And despite repeated sheriff raids on the crack house, she said, the problems there continue.

“What worries us is that they’ve done so many drug busts on that house, why can’t the police shut it down?” wondered the woman, who asked to remain anonymous.

Stop signs are another issue that remains unresolved.

Even with the clout of the MAD town council behind her, council member Carolyn Ziegler said she has fought tooth and nail to get stop signs for busy intersections but to no avail.

“You would think they were made of gold!” she exclaimed in frustration. “What is there, only one? If there’s a problem, why can’t you get one?”

What that illustrates, she said, is that despite its long list of successes, there are limits to what the town council can do.

“We don’t have taxing power,” she said. “We are not a municipality. We can’t say to the transportation department, ‘We need a road sign here, please put it in.’ ”

Still, Julian Rodriguez, principal of Maxwell Elementary School in the area, said there have been visible improvements in the community.

Although the school is part of the Duarte Unified School District, it was always left out of joint programs the city sponsored, like after-school recreation. On top of that, he said, learning often took a back seat to survival in the dangerous neighborhoods some students lived in.

“It was difficult for our youngsters to come and concentrate when the night before there was drug activity and police helicopters flying around,” he said. “So we had to bring some stability to their home lives. . . . Since the town council (formed), you see hope.”

County Supervised:

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County Supervised

There are 15 to 20 identifiable unincorporated areas in the San Gabriel Valley. One of them, near the cities of Monrovia, Arcadia and Duarte, is home to about 11,000 people. The residents have formed a town council to push for increased services from the county.