Compromise Bill on Valley Secession Dies

A compromise San Fernando Valley secession bill died in committee Saturday night, never reaching the Senate floor, where it appeared to have the votes to win approval.

The bill was held in the Senate Appropriations Committee on a partisan 7-4 vote, after a perfunctory hearing.

Since the legislative session ended Saturday night, the issue is apparently dead until next year.

After the vote, an angry Assemblywoman Paula L. Boland (R-Granada Hills), who sponsored the bill, lashed out at Senate President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) for engineering the bill’s death.

“What happened in this building tonight was an abomination for all Californians,” Boland said. “Sen. Lockyer . . . wanted to keep his hands clean and send it to the Appropriations Committee to let them do the hatchet job.

“The way out for the San Fernando Valley is to wait until November and see if we can get a Senate that will set policy,” said Boland, a candidate for state senator.

She also had harsh words for the city of Los Angeles, which she said was intent on controlling the Valley.

“They want to string up the neck of San Fernando Valley people. They want to keep them by the neck and squeeze their blood, so they immediately said, ‘Kill it at all costs.’ ”

Lockyer said Boland was responsible for the loss.

“Ms. Boland had many chances to have her bill heard and just never persuaded enough people,” Lockyer said through a spokesman.

A lobbyist for Los Angeles, Leslie McFadden, said the vote indicated that the city’s more reasonable position on the bill prevailed.

Hopes for the compromise bill dimmed considerably Saturday afternoon when Lockyer sent the compromise measure to an unfriendly committee for a hearing.

The referral of the bill to the Appropriations Committee lessened its chances of making it to the Senate floor for a vote in the final hours of session Saturday night.

The compromise version of the legislation, which passed the Assembly on Friday, would make it easier for the Valley to bail out of Los Angeles by removing the City Council veto over secession requests.

To counter opposition, a provision that all registered Los Angeles voters--not just those in the San Fernando Valley--would get to vote on secession was added to the bill, after it failed in the Senate by two votes.

In referring the bill from the Rules Committee to the Appropriations Committee, Lockyer ignored the recommendation of the secretary of the Senate and expressed irritation with Boland.

“I waived lots of rules to accommodate the author . . . and I was called Mickey Mouse, a dictator and most recently, when it went to the senators for a vote, that it lost because I intimidated senators,” Lockyer said.

Boland, who did not speak at the Rules Committee meeting, said afterward she was disappointed in Lockyer and “‘astounded” at his ruling, which passed the committee on a 4-0 vote.

“He’s more hung up on old press comments than making policy,” Boland said. “He knows he’s wrong. He knows he’s making political decisions, and he knows I’m going to bring out in the daylight his inappropriate decisions.”

Lockyer’s move came a day after the bill’s resurrection in the Assembly, where it passed for the second time. The vehicle for reviving the measure was a Senate bill that Boland amended.

Better still for proponents, the revamped measure appeared to have picked up the two votes it needed to pass the Senate on Saturday night--if it got there.

Procedural problems were flagged immediately by the Senate desk and the bill was shipped first to the Rules Committee, presided over by Lockyer. It violated policy by introducing a new subject to a bill that had already been through the Senate, which means the amendments are subject to a policy committee hearing.

That rule can be waived--as it was many times over the weekend on other measures--or invoked, as was the case with Boland’s secession bill.

Another looming issue in the path of the bill was the Senate’s rule on “germaneness”--which can be invoked on the Senate floor when amendments don’t match the subject of the original bill.

By late afternoon, Boland seemed to have only one hope left--Lockyer’s desire to add his own amendments to the bill. Several weeks ago, Lockyer said he would press for a $1.2-million state-funded study of the impacts of Valley secession and of state law on forming and breaking up cities.

“I have serious policy issues that I am interested in with respect to urban policy for the 21st century,” Lockyer said at Saturday’s Rules Committee hearing. “That debate is going to occur.”

Despite making those comments, Lockyer did not attend the later Appropriations Committee hearing and his amendments were not raised.

After the bill was killed in committee, Lockyer said he expected the complex issues about forming and dividing cities to be revisited next session. Boland had earlier rebuffed his ideas as an expensive, bureaucratic way to kill the bill.

Lockyer has accused Boland of making political hay with the bill to boost her bid to win election to the state Senate and said he would not turn Saturday’s Rules Committee hearing into a forum for again debating the merits of the bill.

“I suggest everyone should have their press conferences separately,” he snapped when Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine), the bill’s new Senate author, argued against sending it to the Appropriations Committee. Johnson argued that the measure was not fiscal, thus did not belong in Appropriations.

Lockyer said his own amendments to the bill, which include the state-funded study, made it fiscal.

He reminded the committee that he had already sought to have a hearing in the Appropriations Committee several weeks ago, but gave Boland the option, which she exercised, to bypass the committee hearing and take her chances on the Senate floor. She lost, and Lockyer said of her new measure, “This bill will start where the last measure left off.”

The Rules Committee backed Lockyer 4 to 1.

If the measure had not been assigned to another committee, Lockyer said it would have languished in the Rules Committee until the session ended.

The defeat of the bill dramatically undermines the Valley secession movement, which had been dormant for years when Boland introduced her bill at the beginning of the year, awakening the area’s deep feelings of being the underserved stepchild area of Los Angeles.

State Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), for example, said at meetings on the bill that he learned of Valley residents’ sense of indignation over their treatment by City Hall.

Still, most civic leaders cautioned that they were not advocating secession, just the bill, which would provide a needed bargaining chip with the city.

Without it, the City Council veto stood as a barrier, not just to secession, but to meaningful discussion of the perceived unequal treatment of the Valley, they argued.

Boland, too, emphasized that her bill did not call for or initiate secession, just removed a stumbling block.

Impassioned opposition to the bill emerged from the ranks of state legislators and City Council members from other parts of Los Angeles.

The effort was criticized as elitist--a thinly veiled attempt by well-heeled suburbia to cut loose from other areas of the city, with their greater cultural diversity and lower socioeconomic status.

Though supporters of the bill waved census data showing the ethnic diversity of the Valley, the criticism did not abate.

One positive outcome of discussion over the bill was a renewal of long-moribund plans to address feelings of alienation from city government by rewriting the outdated city charter.

Supporters of the Boland bill say they will continue their quest for parity when the Legislature reconvenes next year. If she returns to Sacramento as a state senator, Boland says she will lead the charge.