<i> Snapshots of life in the Golden State.</i> : Could You Run That by Us One More Time, Senator?

Tom Hayden’s state Senate district in Los Angeles straddles the Westside and the San Fernando Valley.

So, evidently, does Hayden.

The Santa Monica Democrat was asked for a simple yea or nay on Assemblywoman Paula Boland’s bill that could pave the way for the Valley to secede from the city of L.A.:

Reporter: “Very simply, should the City Council have the veto power over communities’ desire to secede?”

Hayden (who is considering running for mayor of L.A.):

“That would be her strongest argument. But in philosophy, you don’t separate principle from practice. So you have to analyze the full meaning of carrying out that principle, because you’re weighing other principles, like our interdependence, with it. So a solution has to be found that honors the right of people to vote and not be vetoed, but it also, in my view, cannot and should not be pursued unilaterally without simultaneously asking the other questions, because to do so means it’s the only principle. I don’t defend the veto. But it’s not the only principle. There are several principles that have to be combined into a new synthesis here. That’s basically the difference that I have, if there is one. Thank you.” All those who think you can divine a yes (or a no) in that, dial 1-888-I-GET-TOM.

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Safer Highways

Traffic fatalities for 1995 were down 1.1% from the previous year. The rate of 1.51 deaths per 100 million miles of vehicle travel was the lowest in the state’s history. Traffic deaths in which alcohol were involved also fell.

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Category 1994 1995 % Change Vehicle Occupants 2,863 2,816 -1.6% Pedestrians 853 -834 2.2% Motorcyclists 291 -261 10.3% Bicyclists 121 142 +17.4% Others 84 112 +33.3% Total 4,212 -4,165 1.1%

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Source: California Highway Patrol

Researched by NONA YATES / Los Angeles Times

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Fine as frog’s hair: The red-legged frog, the West’s largest native frog and a plentiful amphibian back when, legend holds, Mark Twain memorialized it as Calaveras County’s celebrated jumping frog, made the feds’ threatened species list this week; its population had been wiped out from 70% of the territory where Twain found it more than 120 years ago.

On the heels . . . the webbed toes . . . of that news is a name-only nostalgia comeback for the vanished California grizzly. In the very San Joaquin Valley where the bears were decimated by cultivation, and the last one was shot to death by a rancher in 1922, Fresno investors are buying an Arizona triple-A baseball team and renaming it the Fresno Grizzlies.

Given what happened to the grizzlies, christening the team after the more thriving Raisins might provide a better omen.

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Rides great, corners like a Chrysler--the Chrysler Building: It weighs 7 tons, seats 36, has two fax machines, microwave and Waterford crystal--and this boat of an automobile will be in dry dock until it gets shaved.

Eighteen inches has to come off the custom 66 1/2-foot limo before the CHP will deem it street legal; the maker, Ultra Custom Coach of Riverside, says some “cosmetic work”--evidently a kind of limo liposuction--will take those 18 extra inches right off.

The owner won’t be needing it right away, anyway. Sheik Hamad Bin Hamdan Al-Nahayan of the United Arab Emirates--one of the places that produces the oil that makes the gasoline that fills the gas tank of this highway behemoth--noticed that the satellite tracking system hadn’t yet been installed, so he went home until the navigation device is ready for its close-up.

The illegal excess was discovered when the CHP pulled the limo over last week. In Carlsbad . . . Oceanside . . . Leucadia. . . .

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One offs: Now that the case is over, 1,205 soccer balls--those that weren’t filled with heroin in a ruse to smuggle the drug in from Pakistan five years ago--are being donated to Stockton’s parks and recreation department. . . . A San Jose woman is suing her ex-landlord for $2 million for invasion of privacy, for allegedly videotaping her with a hidden camera lens made to look like a smoke detector. . . . A federal judge ordered two San Diego lawyers to reimburse up to $20,000 in legal costs for a frivolous lawsuit--a $5.4-million claim by a man who sued the city because women used the men’s bathroom during a concert at Jack Murphy Stadium, and sued the stadium beer vendor because he would not have needed the bathrooms if he had not bought beer.

EXIT LINE

“Marin is no longer populated by artists. It’s full of money managers and venture capitalists who drive their Lexuses with one hand. . . . It’s become the land of nouveau mansions.”

--Rocker Todd Rundgren, who is moving to Kauai from Marin County--a place that he says “attracts the feckless nouveau riche”--after 10 years’ residence in the Bay Area.

California Dateline appears every other Friday.