NEWS ANALYSIS : City Hall Perceptions Fuel Talk of Secession

In the debate over whether to cleave the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles, perception often plays a bigger role than reality.

Proponents of secession talk about the Valley not getting its fair share or about it being underrepresented in City Hall or about how it carries the rest of the city on its fiscal back.

Experts who have studied the issue say that Los Angeles’ giant municipal government is more efficient than many big cities’. The city’s bureaucracy is smaller than those in most metropolitan areas, according to census statistics, while most services from trash collection to fire protection are better--and the Valley gets a good portion of them.

“Although we look at Los Angeles as if it’s overgrown, compared to New York and Chicago, the bureaucracy is relatively small,” said Raphael Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political science professor who has studied Los Angeles government for many years.

“I think Los Angeles, compared to a lot of these cities, is well run.”

UCLA public policy professor Xandra Kayden agrees, saying although problems exist, “much more works here than doesn’t.”

But how well or how poorly City Hall runs Los Angeles is almost a secondary point in the secession discussion.

What matters is that residents feel isolated from their political leaders. They can’t complain over the back fence to their mayor and neighbor about potholes, the way residents in small towns can. Even on a good day, City Hall is a 30-minute drive from the Valley. And in a city of 3.5 million people, individual voices often get lost in the clamor.

“People want secession because they feel too distant from their leadership,” said Jeff Brain, a community activist who co-founded a group to support a bill authored by Republican Assemblywoman Paula Boland of Granada Hills that would make secession easier.

A recent Los Angeles Times Poll, for instance, showed that 47% of Valley residents feel shortchanged by city services. And 46% of the Valley’s registered voters said they would vote to secede from Los Angeles if an election were held today. That support drops in half, though, if such a split would raise taxes or assessment fees.

Even so, the feeling persists--in the Valley and other areas of the city--that Los Angeles as a metropolis would be better off as a collection of smaller, more manageable municipalities.

“I think secession is being driven not because of the cost of the bureaucracy, but because our council members and mayor are not responsive,” said Richard Close, who heads the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn., and supports a breakup.

“This is supposed to be a local government, but you can’t have local government if it stretches from Chatsworth to San Pedro.”

In some ways, this urge to break away has its roots at the very birth of the nation. As it expanded west, the feeling only grew.

“In the United States, we tend to atomize our power,” said Steve Frates, senior researcher at the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College. “This is particularly true in California and acutely true in Los Angeles.”

In Los Angeles, geography and climate play roles as well. Mountains split the city. San Pedro is at least three ecosystems removed from Chatsworth.

“For people in the Valley, City Hall seems like London during the American Revolution,” Sonenshein said.

When Los Angeles’ current bureaucracy was formed in the 1920s and ‘30s, the city was something of a backwater. The Valley was open fields, and the waves of postwar immigration had yet to take place. For a city of a few hundred thousand, Los Angeles’ structure of powerful council and professional department heads worked well.

And for the most part it still does.

But the 15 council members--four of whom represent just the Valley--now each represent as many people as some members of Congress. They respond as best they can to problems within their own districts, but often fail to take a citywide view, critics complain. So when the City Council itself treats Los Angeles as 15 different places, few can fault residents for taking the same view.

“I think there is an attitude problem,” said City Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents the northwest Valley. “I don’t think we think as a city anymore.”

An example of that mentality is manifested in the argument by Valley secession proponents that they are tired of their tax dollars subsidizing what they consider wasteful projects in other parts of the city.

“The city of Los Angeles has always used the Valley as a sponge to support their pork-barrel projects,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who represents parts of the Valley.

Though no one has recently done a comprehensive analysis to determine whether the Valley gets its fair share of city services, secession supporters often cite a 1976 study by the Committee Investigating Valley Independent City/County, or CIVICC, that said Valley residents contribute 40 cents of every dollar collected by the city but receive just 15 cents in services in return.

That study was flawed, however, basing its conclusions on how many city workers were assigned to the Valley and not evaluating city services that extend to residents throughout the city. Critics said it did not calculate the benefits Valley residents get from city facilities such as the harbor, the Los Angeles International Airport and the Hyperion sewage treatment plant--all of which are in other parts of the city.

A survey of some key city services indicates that, regardless of how many city workers are assigned to the Valley, the services provided are comparable to those in other parts of the city.

For example, the Valley had 28% of the city’s emergency calls on firefighting services in 1995. Yet it receives 31% of the firefighters and emergency medical personnel, according to Fire Department records.

The Fire Department’s average response time in the Valley is six minutes and 54 seconds, which is 12 seconds longer than the citywide average of six minutes and 42 seconds. But fire officials attribute the 12-second difference to the Valley’s spread-out, low-density neighborhoods.

“It has more to do with the growth of the Valley and the way development has been spread out,” Battalion Chief Roger Gillis said.

The Los Angeles Police Department assigned 26% of its sworn officers--or 1,408 men and women--to the Valley in 1994, the last year for which figures are available. Some secession supporters believe the Valley should get about 35% of the police force to reflect that the Valley has about 35% of the city’s population.

But police counter that officers are deployed based on where crime is generated, not on population. The Valley has a slightly lower crime rate than the rest of the city. According to police records for April, police took seven minutes and 18 seconds on average to respond to crime calls in the Valley--three seconds longer than the citywide average. The department’s West Los Angeles bureau has the slowest response time: seven minutes, 48 seconds.

Again, this means of calculating how services are allotted does not take into account the services provided by some departments’ centrally located units, such as the Police Department’s anti-terrorist unit or the Fire Department’s hazardous materials unit.

Despite those numbers, residents complain that they feel as if no one is listening, that they have no say in how decisions are made. That has prompted inquiries into how other cities seek to involve a wider spectrum of residents. While most seem appealing on the surface, none is a miracle cure, according to experts.

For example, some Valley residents and city officials have suggested adopting a system similar to New York’s, in which each of the five boroughs retains a degree of autonomy. Citywide, New York has 51 City Council members, compared with Los Angeles’ 15.

Even so, New York has wrestled for six years with a secession movement by the borough of Staten Island. Residents--who, like some Valley residents, view their part of town as a “stepchild”--complain that the city is too large and unresponsive and blame city officials for high bridge tolls, selling off Staten Island land and polluting its air.

City Councilman Richard Alarcon, who introduced a motion to have city analysts study other forms of city government to address Valley complaints, suggested that Seattle might be a model for Los Angeles. Alarcon represents the northeast Valley.

Seattle has a council-mayoral system similar to Los Angeles’, except that officials there are elected on a citywide basis. The idea is that council members elected at-large do not become provincial and instead decide issues based on what is best for the entire city.

But not everyone in Seattle thinks the system works.

For the past few years, West Seattle--a suburb of conservative, middle-class residents--has threatened to secede, complaining that the city government has ignored its concerns about airport noise, development and school busing.

If secession should gain currency and support in the Valley, would it do anything to help the region?

“I don’t think people understand what they would be giving up,” he said. “I’m not sure we can survive as a series of Sherman Oakses and downtowns. I think the whole structure would become pretty weak pretty quickly.”

Others agree.

“Like it or not, the city has evolved the way it has,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky.

And two of the Valley’s biggest gripes--water costs and mass transit--would be virtually unaffected by a split.

The Valley, which was brought into Los Angeles’ orbit by the pull of water, would still need to buy it from someplace--either the city’s Department of Water and Power or the Metropolitan Water District.

“Water is the most critical issue,” said George Wein, vice chairman of the MWD and a Northridge resident. “Probably all this talk doesn’t mean anything because the Valley doesn’t own the water. The city does.”

If the Valley bought directly from the MWD, as many smaller Southern California cities do, it would drive up demand and costs, he said. But if the Valley bought from the DWP as an outside customer, it could have a little negotiating power to reduce costs.

Such an arrangement, though, could take years to hammer out, said Jim Wickser, assistant general manager for water at the DWP. “There are a lot of options out there that could be worked out that could take a lot of years,” he said, “but the degree of independence that the Valley wants is what could be messy.”

With regard to transit, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority governs how routes are determined. A Valley split would make little difference. As it is, four of the MTA’s 13-member board represent the city. Splitting the city would split representation, but MTA officials said it is difficult to know how.

Ultimately, the very process of discussing secession may actually bring changes in the way the city operates, Sonenshein and others believe. Already, there is talk of reorganizing city government to be more responsive. City Councilman Mike Feuer, whose district includes Sherman Oaks, said he wants to “bring decision-making down to the neighborhood level.”

But it also raises the question of whether any city--no matter how big or small--can be all things to all its residents.

“We may be the first major city to break up, but once the dam breaks, you will see an explosion of this kind of phenomenon,” predicted Frates, who points to the trend toward small, nimble organizations.

“It’s in our nature to carve our own niche.”