LAFCO Board Members Learn to Set Boundaries in Disputes

First came the raucous commission meetings and accusations. Then it digressed into written death threats.

“I had a letter show up inside my car,” said Phillip R. Schwartze, 54, former mayor of San Juan Capistrano. “A week or two later, the letter showed up again, inside my locked car.”

Schwartze was speaking of the late 1980s and his stint as chairman of an obscure county group called the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), a panel of seven members who struggle with the bureaucratic but difficult decisions concerning land annexations and government consolidations and reorganizations.

Some LAFCO officials say the coming months could offer a replay of what happened a decade ago when South County rearranged itself from a mass of county-governed land into five new cities, including Mission Viejo, Dana Point, Laguna Niguel, Laguna Hills and Lake Forest.

Today, water districts all over the county are being pushed by state legislation to consolidate, and the county bankruptcy has hastened the call for unincorporated areas, stretching from Rossmoor to north Tustin, to merge into adjacent cities or, in the case of Rancho Santa Margarita, Foothill Ranch and Coto de Caza, perhaps form new cities entirely.

In addition, Assemblyman Curt Pringle (R-Garden Grove) has suggested that LAFCO is too mired in politics to handle these decisions properly. He has introduced legislation that could change the makeup of the commission.

Dana Smith, LAFCO’s executive officer, calls the current situation potentially explosive.

“I could probably easily list 20 things right now that we are involved in,” Smith said. “Because they are really local issues and they involve land and property values, they become emotional. The supervisors who sit on the commission always come away saying these issues are so intense.”

From the public’s perspective, officials said, LAFCO typically goes along for months virtually unnoticed until a city attempts to annex an area. Then, as Schwartze and other LAFCO veterans explain, “all hell can break loose.”

“You don’t make a lot of friends over there [at LAFCO],” said Don Saltarelli, the former county supervisor who was a LAFCO commissioner for 11 years while a member of the Tustin City Council.

“LAFCO was set up to do what people, left to their own devices, do not do on their own. . . . But it is an agency that, from a taxpayers’ point of view, is one of the county’s most vital. This is the commission that has to do annexations and consolidations, which to me is something that urgently needs to be done.”

Perhaps no LAFCO battle has ever matched the issue in which Schwartze had his life threatened by an anonymous letter writer: the incorporation fight between the two communities of Dana Point and Laguna Niguel. Both communities pined for the prime coastal property called Monarch Beach that included the Ritz-Carlton hotel, which meant the prestige of being a coastal community, plus annual revenues of about $2 million a year from bed taxes.

Although Monarch Beach was originally planned as part of Laguna Niguel, Dana Point wound up winning the land and some people still have not forgiven the LAFCO commissioners.

“A lot of us were embittered--I don’t think that’s too strong a word,” said Bruce Rasner of Laguna Niguel, an attorney who was co-chair of the community’s incorporation task force. “Anyone who goes to LAFCO expecting a simple rubber stamp on what appears to be a reasonable solution may be in for a surprise. Politics finds its way into these things.”

Since the Dana Point-Laguna Niguel squabble, the makeup of LAFCO has been expanded.

Instead of five members there are now seven, including two county supervisors (Todd Spitzer and Charles V. Smith), two members from city councils (Randal J. Bressette of Laguna Hills and Peter Herzog of Lake Forest), two members from special districts (Robert Huntley of the Municipal Water District of Orange County and John Withers of the Irvine Ranch Water District) and a public member (David Boran of Huntington Harbour).

That could change again.

Pringle contends that the commission is made up of too many elected officials who bring their own agendas and biases.

Although his legislation is still in the formative stage, Pringle said it is clear that “there are better ways to do this” than the way LAFCO operates today.

“Maybe we need to add more public [commission] members and cut down the members from local government. Maybe we should have the grand jury pick the members who would have no bias,” Pringle said. “We need to find some way to get more public members without vested interests on the commission.”

Pringle also suggested that he may include a request that cities make contributions to increase the funding for LAFCO, thereby enabling the agency to hire more staff and achieve more independence. The agency’s budget is $330,000 a year.

Among the other issues to be considered by LAFCO are:

* Whether to incorporate the Leisure World communities in Rossmoor and Laguna Hills.

* The controversial annexation of North Tustin to Tustin.

* The reorganization of the Orange County Sanitation Districts.

* Decide which of its surrounding cities, if any, should annex Midway City, an unincorporated island.