Other Separatist Areas May Try for Cityhood

The eyes that have keenly watched the secession bill’s bumpy ride through Sacramento have not been from the San Fernando Valley alone.

For years, breakaway-minded neighborhoods in other parts of Los Angeles and around California have been thwarted by a law allowing their city councils to just say no to their requests to pull out. Those communities may soon receive a boost in their efforts to form their own local governments now that AB 62, legislation to confiscate that power, has been approved by Gov. Pete Wilson.

Within Los Angeles, several activists have already joined in an “Alliance for Self-Determination” to explore secession possibilities for areas from Eagle Rock to San Pedro, Hollywood to South-Central. Like their fellow dissidents in the Valley, unhappy residents in those neighborhoods complain of short shrift and scant services from a City Hall they feel is far removed from their concerns.

“We’re trying to re-create our local communities which were stolen from us by the city of Los Angeles 80 years ago in a battle over water rights,” said Rex Frankel of Westchester, near Los Angeles International Airport. “Pretty much everyone I talk to in Westchester thinks we should be our own city.”

Recently, Frankel set up a booth at a street fair in Venice offering information on how to secede from the city and whom to contact in various neighborhoods such as Wilmington and Benedict Canyon. Now that the secession-easing bill has earned the governor’s signature, Frankel plans to be out in his own community on Jan. 1 collecting the signatures necessary to initiate the breakaway process.

“There’s no point in waiting,” said Frankel, a landscaper who has lived in Westchester for more than 33 years and who publishes a monthly newspaper.

Although others are not ready to start petitioning, they hope the secession bill’s success will rejuvenate breakaway drives that screeched to a halt when confronted with City Council opposition.

In 1989, alarmed by a rise in affordable housing for the poor and an increase in crime, restaurateur Ralph LePre helped form a group pressing for independence for his Long Beach neighborhood, but was stopped cold by the City Council’s ability to veto a secession. Now he harbors hope once again.

“I’ll attempt to revive this thing because there are still some very discontented people in Long Beach,” LePre said, crediting Valley secessionists as the ones who “really got this going.”

Elsewhere in Southern California, rebellious rumblings have also surfaced in the state’s second-largest city, San Diego, where homeowners in La Jolla and San Ysidro sometimes mutter about the possibility of cityhood.

In Northern California, residents of the upscale Almaden Valley enclave of San Jose often regard themselves as a breed apart, sometimes even writing their addresses as “Almaden Valley, Calif.,” said George Bettisworth, president of the Almaden Valley Community Assn. They would gaze in envy at Saratoga and Los Gatos, suburbs that are cities in their own right.

But San Jose has become sufficiently responsive to the needs of Almaden Valley, and the burning civic issue at the moment is paint peeling from sidewalk lampposts. Still, “maybe when the news is out [about AB 62], they’ll think about it,” Bettisworth said.