SAN GABRIEL VALLEY / COVER STORY : Taking Control of the Streets : In County Territory, Some Are Content, Some Are Confused : There are residents who say they don’t find drawbacks to not living in a city. Others say they feel powerless and beset by jurisdictional disputes.

The line between city and county can be confusing--even absurd. One county resident who has lived near the edge of Duarte for three years said she thought her home was within city boundaries.

And Joan Schmidt, a town council member in the Monrovia-Arcadia-Duarte area, described a house on Boley Street that literally straddles the border with Arcadia.

“If the children sleep in the front bedroom they go to school” in the unincorporated area, she said. “If they sleep in the back bedroom they go to school in Arcadia.”

There are up to 20 identifiable unincorporated areas scattered across the San Gabriel Valley. Some are large and organized, others a scant few streets whose own residents don’t know they’re not in a city. And the levels of contentment among residents vary as widely as the areas they live in.

Altadena and Hacienda Heights, communities of about 50,000 residents, have well-established and longstanding organizations of residents. But that hasn’t necessarily given residents of those areas a feeling of local empowerment.

Just ask Stephen Lamb, a member of the Altadena town council, if the town council works.

“Not at all” is his answer. Without the full powers of a municipal government, he said, a town council is an exercise in futility.

Lamb contends that just about nothing in the county works the way it should. County officials fail to cite residents who leave trash-filled dumpsters in their yards, he said. The nearest Public Works building department office in Arcadia is inconveniently located, he said, and its employees are rude.

“We have three (sheriff’s) cars on duty in Altadena at any time. Only God knows what they do because they don’t write any traffic tickets and they certainly don’t interface with gang members,” Lamb complained.

The Altadena Sheriff’s Department substation commander, Lt. John Samuel, said that he has one full-time deputy assigned to parking violations and three assigned to an anti-gang unit.

But what irks Lamb the most is that the community lacks the means to resolve its problems on its own.

“We don’t get the one basic service that everyone is supposed to get from their government, which is representation,” he said. “We don’t have democracy here.”

Jeff Yan, president of the Hacienda Heights Improvement Assn., echoed Lamb’s frustration. Although most services in the area are adequate, he said, citizens feel powerless when really controversial items, like development issues or local taxes, are at stake.

“By having (County Supervisor Deane Dana’s) field office in Rowland Heights, we have an opportunity to raise our concerns,” he said. “Day-to-day concerns do get taken care of.” But on the big issues, he said, there are very limited opportunities to influence the County Board of Supervisors.”

A case in point is the proposed Puente Hills landfill, which the supervisors approved over bitter opposition from Hacienda Heights homeowners, who say the dump will mar the nearby landscape.

Colene McMahon, a Neighborhood Watch captain in an unincorporated area near Covina, complains about cars that go screeching through intersections in the neighborhood, which has no stop signs to slow them.

Stop signs wouldn’t seem to be an unattainable request, but county residents say they are one of the hardest things to get.

“They say we don’t have enough traffic to have stop signs,” McMahon said. “Why do they always wait till something happens to a kid before they do something? Every homeowner pays for these things, yet they say we don’t need them.”

However, some residents of unincorporated county areas say they’re perfectly content.

Shannon Logue, also a resident of the unincorporated area near Covina, said she was apprehensive about county life when she moved from the city of La Verne. So far, though, she has had no complaints.

“Everyone I’ve dealt with here I’m real happy with,” she said. “The police and fire respond real quickly.”

In fact, Sheriff’s Department response times for several unincorporated county areas in the San Gabriel Valley are roughly equal to response times for the cities they patrol.

The Walnut sheriff’s substation reports an average emergency response time of 4.1 minutes. Its unincorporated patrol areas range from 3.5 minutes for Bonelli Park near San Dimas to 5.2 minutes for the county area near Azusa. Response time for contract cities vary from 3.4 minutes for San Dimas to 5.1 for Walnut.