They Have Seceded Where Boland Failed

Three weeks have passed since the Los Angeles City Council was rocked by a secession of sorts. Aware that defeat was imminent, angry that the debate was being terminated, seven council members staged an impromptu walkout, taking the quorum with them.

The dramatics had nothing to do with Assemblywoman Paula Boland’s legislation, now cryogenically frozen, to make it easier for the San Fernando Valley to break away from the city of Los Angeles. The walkout concerned the arcane issue of calculating sewer fees. But when the debate was finished four days later, the results were inevitably interpreted in regional terms.

The Valley won, the Daily News’ banner headline declared. The Valley and the Westside won, reported The Times. The rest of L.A., it was agreed, took a drubbing.

All of which, Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg insists, is a crude simplification, since the new sewer fee will scatter its winners and losers throughout the city. What is overlooked, Goldberg suggests, is the big story that “nobody wants to talk about”--the way L.A.’s haves are seceding from L.A.’s have-nots.

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This is by no means just a local phenomenon. Goldberg, an unabashed liberal whose district includes Hollywood, Silver Lake and Echo Park, sees this as an American trend. The planned dismantling of federal welfare programs is a recent example.

The L.A. City Council, she argues, has its own role in protecting the have-nots, a group she defines as not just the jobless and the working poor, but the nervous middle class as well.

The debate over fees served as a battleground.

Leading the fight for a new formula was Councilwoman Laura Chick of the West Valley, who successfully argued that the sewer charge was a user fee that for years had been unfairly based on water usage. Because the city cannot measure how much sewage each household generates, it has relied on a formula assuming about 60% of the water received by a household winds up going down the drain as waste water. Residents of the Valley have long complained that this formula has doubly penalized them for living in an area with large lots and higher temperatures. Water used for landscaping and swimming pools, they note, doesn’t enter the sewer system.

Folks who live in cramped apartments, without swimming pools and large lawns and gardens, tend to be less than sympathetic to this argument. The new fee structure, based on the lower water usage in rainy winter months, is expected to reduce the typical water rates in nine council districts while raising rates in six. In Marvin Braude’s affluent Westside-to-West Valley district, the estimated median combined water and sewer rates would go down $25.31 annually. At the other extreme was Richard Alatorre’s Eastside district, where the median cost would rise $11.73.

That’s an average increase of less than $1 a month. This may seem like chump change, but again, Goldberg argues that median rates are simplistic. Most people, she suggests, won’t see much of a difference in their bills. What will happen, she says, is that those with the largest properties and swimming pools would benefit disproportionately at the expense of apartment dwellers.

Chick points out that a user fee, unlike a progressive income tax, isn’t a proper means for redistributing wealth.

“There are people who look at everything, and conceptualize everything, as the struggle between rich and poor, and I think that’s dangerous,” Chick said. “They tend to overlook and undervalue other relevant points of view and perspectives.”

Chick called the council’s 8-6 decision “a bittersweet victory.”

“I was hearing a lot from colleagues about fairness. But there’s more than one way to define fair.”

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In some quarters it was wistfully suggested that the Valley’s secession sentiment influenced the council decision. It’s interesting, however, that Councilman Rudy Svorinich of San Pedro, the only non-Valley council member to endorse secession legislation, led the revolt against the new sewer fee formula, likening it to “economic apartheid.”

The blood pressure was high that day because the stakes were tangible and consequential, even if the dollar amounts seemed modest. Three months earlier, when the council voted 8 to 6 to oppose the Boland bill, the stakes were abstract. Nobody got mad enough to walk out, even though the bill, as then conceived, would have divided Angelenos into a more stark set of haves and have-nots--those who’d get to vote and those who wouldn’t.

Jackie Goldberg, meanwhile, worries that a society increasingly polarized between rich and poor may yet splinter in ways we may all live to regret, in all parts of the city. Secession, she suggests, would prove more of an evasion than a solution.

“It’s the old story,” she says. “Be careful what you wish for.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311. Please include a phone number.