Santa Clarita Thriving on ‘Local Control’

From long before the birth of their city and through its incorporation and first decade, Santa Claritans have had a rallying cry and all-purpose motto: local control.

Officials revel in it. Residents repeat it endlessly in settings from the school board to the soccer field. It has appeared on stickers affixed to the minivans and sport-utility vehicles roaming the spacious landscape once famously traveled by covered wagons and the horses of early western-movie stars.

Ten years ago Monday, those two enticing words gained true weight when the 39-square-mile triangle just north of Los Angeles between the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways officially became the city of Santa Clarita. With about 110,000 people spread across the four distinct communities of Valencia, Saugus, Canyon Country and Newhall, it was the largest municipality ever allowed to incorporate in California.

While many of the initial hurdles to setting up a new city have been cleared, there are inevitable questions as the city enters its second decade, with a population of 142,000 and growing.

What has local control actually brought?

With thousands of new residents heeding developers’ call to flee northward, can Santa Clarita hang on to the image that civic boosters take such pride in? A safe, clean middle-class alternative to Los Angeles, which the late local newspaper publisher Scott Newhall once lambasted as “the greatest aggregation of sneak thieves, rapists, child molesters, armed robbers and phantom flashers ever gathered in one place in the long history of mankind.”

City Manager George Carvalho, who has occupied the post almost since the city was incorporated, professes utter confidence in Santa Clarita’s future and speaks proudly of its accomplishments.

“We’ve brought local government here, accessible to the people that want to participate,” Carvalho said. “We also created a vision for the community, which has strong values as to what they want.”

The values--as articulated by dozens of officials, residents, activists and business executives--are essentially those that promote a clean, quiet, family-friendly city large enough to offer shopping, hiking trails and other amenities but small enough to feel like a refuge from big-city turmoil.

As evidence that such values flourish, many point to the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, when neighbors helped neighbors cope after the city suffered $400 million in damage and was largely isolated. Portions of the two freeways connecting Santa Clarita with the rest of greater Los Angeles collapsed and electric power and water service was disrupted for several weeks.

The city set up tents to house rescue operations and supplied bottled water. Carpools formed. Residents joined officials in clearing away the rubble of homes and businesses.

“People in Santa Clarita are very community-oriented,” said Howard “Buck” McKeon, the city’s first mayor and now a Republican congressman serving the area. “Cityhood gives them more of a chance to get involved.”

Before 1987, there was no local government framework for such cooperation, as residents were governed exclusively by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in downtown Los Angeles, 35 miles away. The region’s supervisor, Mike Antonovich, represents a 2,700-square-mile area that also includes Pasadena, Lancaster, Palmdale and Glendale.

A sense of disenfranchisement gave rise to repeated incorporation movements dating to 1920, when Newhall and Saugus were known as backdrops for western movies and a home to pioneers, images still celebrated in the city’s annual Cowboy Poetry Festival.

Now, boosters say, instead of dealing with a faraway bureaucracy, residents can simply go to City Hall and meet with officials who can employ their new powers to smooth beat-up streets, landscape road medians and create parks.

The city, which is still policed under contract by the county Sheriff’s Department, has the fourth-lowest crime rate among all U.S. cities with populations greater than 100,000. It has attracted premier businesses such as Princess Cruise Lines and the Remo Drum Corp.

It is no longer known solely as the home of Six Flags Magic Mountain, the amusement park.

Carvalho delights in “looking ahead at what will be happening 10, 20, 50 years from now.”

While recounting an anecdote about a man who sought the city’s help with a problem he was having with underground city pipes on his property, Carvalho’s eyes widen and his usually measured speaking tone grows animated.

“I hopped in my truck and drove out to his place and he showed me what the problem was,” Carvalho recalled. “We talked it over and I signed some paperwork and he was all set. He told me, ‘Wow, I never could have gotten that level of service from the county.’ ”

Many blithely use the term “Mayberry, RFD” to describe button-down Santa Clarita, which hosts an annual film festival showcasing strictly G-rated works and whose inaugural celebration drew 2,000 people who swayed back and forth while singing the refrain “reach out and touch somebody’s hand.”

Beneath that homespun charm, others counter, lies what urban planners call an “edge city” largely defined by the county government’s land-use policies and moneyed developers. The control, they maintain, is anything but local.

Santa Clarita is ringed by large swaths of unincorporated county land. Some small tracts have been annexed over the years, bumping the city’s size up to its current 45 square miles. But developers--especially the giant Newhall Land and Farming Co.--have targeted projects for land regulated by the county, which takes a far more laissez faire stance on development than neighboring Ventura County or other counties home to fast-growing cities.

Linking the two governments still further is City Councilwoman and Mayor Pro Tem Jo Anne Darcy. Since 1980 she has been Antonovich’s Santa Clarita field deputy, but also has served on the council since the city was founded, an unusual arrangement that city lawyers say is perfectly legal but critics contend gives the supervisor a direct pipeline to the City Council.

The proposed Newhall Ranch project would bring 70,000 new residents to a 12,000-acre site along the Golden State Freeway, just outside the city’s boundaries. It would be the county’s biggest residential development.

The city’s General Plan caps the population of the valley at 270,000, but county approval of Newhall Ranch could expand that number to 338,000.

The City Council voted to oppose the development because, members argued, it would prove a drain on city resources without adding to its tax base. The city also unsuccessfully sought a sphere of influence from the Local Agency Formation Commission that would have given it some political leverage over 160 square miles of neighboring county land.

“The dream of obtaining local control is only partly fulfilled,” said Allan Cameron, a self-styled political watchdog and founder of the Santa Clarita Organization to Protect the Environment.

Mike Davis, an urban affairs specialist and faculty member at universities including UCLA and Cal State Northridge, has studied the Newhall Ranch project. He noted that in Ventura County, unincorporated county land slated for development must first be incorporated into a city before permits are granted. Not so next door in Los Angeles County.

City Councilwoman Jill Klajic, a 20-year resident, fears the result of the current trend. “People move here because they don’t want to be . . . down there,” she said, holding up crossed index fingers in a mock vampire-defense gesture.

“You go down to the San Fernando Valley and you see all the graffiti, the traffic, the dilapidated schools. That’s growth. That’s what too much too soon has brought.”

Davis sees the differences pulling Santa Clarita away from Los Angeles in the minds of the residents, but says they will ultimately not be able to create a refuge free of L.A.’s problems.

“What you’re seeing is the formation of a new Orange County,” he said. “When you flee from L.A., you tend to bring everything with you.”

In fact, there are links between the two areas. Two former board members of the Newhall Land company went on to become presidents of the Irvine Co., which planned the Orange County city of Irvine. Newhall Land launched the planned community of Valencia in 1965, only a few years after the beginnings of Irvine.

Some critics have assailed Irvine, as with other Orange County cities, as a symbol of white flight and overdevelopment.

The same “cannibalistic cycle” likely is in store for Santa Clarita, Davis said. Regions on the fringe of the urban area have often followed the path taken by Los Angeles, which sold itself decades ago as a sun-splashed Eden of orange groves and palm trees, only to be overrun by the hordes who bought the image and settled before land-use policy had been firmly set.

“People here grow up with the legacy that paradise gets destroyed. Then when they get older they try to start all over again, and L.A. keeps stamping out the same suburbs,” he said.

Tom Lee, chairman and CEO of Newhall Land, disputes the accusation that his company is exploiting open space and creating a dense new suburban ring for huge profit.

“What we’re trying to do here is maintain and enhance a great quality of life,” he said. “That’s what we’ve always tried to sell. The city is trying to do the same thing. What we differ on is . . . the vision of what makes a great place to live. We think . . . that it is not a function of density. It’s a function of how well-planned the community is.”

Lee has no problem with county government.

“They’re accepting the fact that it’s inevitable that people will come and they’re saying that we have to do what it takes,” he said. “They’re doing what they have to do to accommodate the growth. Some small cities . . . want to build a wall around the city and say, ‘No more.’ ”

Dave Vannatta, Antonovich’s land-use deputy, said Santa Clarita’s formation was fueled by ample county-bashing, but, as the nation’s most populous county, Los Angeles is used to that. He contends that county-city relations have improved, though, citing their joint work on the annexation of land just north of Valencia.

“Unlike five or six years ago, people are starting to focus more on cooperation,” he said.

Patrick Wirtz, a PhD candidate at the USC School of Urban Development and Planning, recently completed a 300-page history of Valencia. Because his research was funded by Newhall Land, he could not discuss his findings in detail until they had been cleared by company officials.

But he did say the aim of developers in Santa Clarita was not to create a bedroom community. Rather, the goal was--and is--a “regional center” combining new housing and schools with jobs, environmental resources and commercial centers.

As Lee put it, “People want to live in a small town, an old-fashioned town and return to their roots. And that’s what they find here.”

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Sizing Up a Decade

Looking back on 10 years of cityhood, Santa Clarita leaders acknowledge it’s not always easy to quantify their city’s evolution. Most officials still rely on data from the 1990 U.S. Census. But they are certain of one thing: The next decade will likely be shaped-by the challenge of growing while maintaining the city’s identity.

City Government

In its first full year, the city had about a dozen employees and contracted with the county to provide most services. Its annual overall budget for 1988-89 was $29 million. Today, the city has about 200 full-time employees and an annual overal budget of $84.8 million.

Racial Makeup

At incorporation, the city was 92% white. In 1996, it was estimated to be 84% white, 2% black, 6% Asian and Pacific Islander and 9% “other” a category that includes Latinos.

Note: Figures are rounded, so they add up to more than 100%

Population

From 1980 to 1990, the population within the current city limits grew from 62,106 to 108,711, according to the U.S. Census. In 1996, the San Diego-based demographic company National Decision Systems estimated the population at 119,795, but city and state officials put it at nearly 145,000.

Age

In 1987, the average age of the city’s residents was 29. In 1996, it was 32.

Income

The average household in 1987 earned $42,981 but now earns $69,766,

Sources: City of Santa Clarita Planning Department, National Decision Systems study prepared for the city in September 1996.