Valley Secession Effort’s Roots Go Back to the ‘70s

At a time when cappuccino was still exotic, avocado was a desirable color and ranch-style homes were sprouting up throughout the San Fernando Valley, a handful of greenhorn political activists huddled in a restaurant on Ventura Boulevard to hatch a plot against the city of Los Angeles.

Their mission: uncoupling the Valley from L.A. to form a separate, independent city. The year: 1975.

The Valley uprising was short-lived, crushed by the state Legislature at the urging of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley and other big-city heavyweights in California.

But key participants in the drive have become some of the Valley’s most influential citizens, and two of them now sit on the state authority that may decide whether Valley secession is possible. Both say that despite their earlier backing of a breakaway, they are now neutral.

Led in part by Hal Bernson, owner of a jeans store at Northridge Fashion Center, the rebel suburbanites included an insurance salesman, a real estate agent, a lawyer and a car dealer. Together they formed CIVICC--the Committee Investigating Valley Independent City/County.

Most were rising stars within local business associations, a spawning ground for Valley politicians in the ‘70s. Many became apostles of the anti-busing and Proposition 13 movements.

Despite its demise in 1978, CIVICC’s campaign revealed and inflamed Valley residents’ sense that they were being slighted and ignored by the city of Los Angeles. That disenchantment recently reemerged in a new Valley secession effort led by Valley VOTE, a group of business leaders and homeowner associations.

“Here we are almost 25 years later, and the feeling of resentment still exists,” said Larry Calemine, a CIVICC founder who helped develop Warner Center and Porter Ranch. He said the failed ‘70s effort nonetheless paid dividends for the Valley in the form of better police and fire protection and greater representation on city commissions.

CIVICC put the city’s shortcomings on paper for the first time, commissioning a study that concluded Valley taxpayers were being shortchanged when it came to receiving city services, said Bernson, whom Valley residents elected to the City Council in 1979 and have kept there ever since.

“People didn’t forget,” Bernson said.

Along with Bernson and Calemine, CIVICC’s old roster reads like a who’s who of the Valley’s most influential civic leaders: Herbert Boeckmann, owner of Galpin Ford and a city police commissioner; Paula Boland of Granada Hills, former Republican state legislator and member of the city’s elected charter reform commission; and Bobbi Fiedler, former Republican congresswoman and school board member from Northridge, who led the Valley’s anti-busing movement in the ‘70s.

*

Today they find themselves hip deep in the current secession debate.

Boland, a real estate agent when she joined CIVICC, was elected to the Assembly in 1990 and kicked off the modern secession movement. Her legislation to make Valley independence easier failed. But after she left office, a compromise version of her bill passed, giving life to Valley VOTE’s ongoing petition drive for possible secession.

Calemine and Bernson are members of the state’s Local Agency Formation Commission, which may ultimately decide whether Valley secession is possible. Bernson is a commissioner, representing the city of Los Angeles, and Calemine is executive director.

If Valley VOTE collects 135,000 signatures by Aug. 27, the state agency will be required to conduct a study on the possible impact of a split. It would then decide whether to put secession on the ballot for a citywide vote.

Boeckmann is one of Southern California’s most successful auto dealers and a close political ally of Mayor Richard Riordan, who appointed Boeckmann to the city Police Commission. Boeckmann is one of Valley VOTE’s biggest financial backers. He donated $10,000 to the group and launched a fund-raiser to bring in $150,000 more. This despite Riordan’s staunch opposition to Valley secession.

Both Bernson and Calemine say their roles on the state agency demand they stay neutral on the secession debate.

“I am now in a position like a judge,” Bernson said. “What I feel in my heart is one thing. But I have to act accordingly and responsibly for the position that I hold.”

Calemine, who has no vote on the commission, said he is neither for nor against Valley secession: “I’m not going to know how I feel until the application is dumped on my doorstep and we study the issue.”

But another CIVICC veteran and current secession proponent becomes almost giddy when he looks over today’s political landscape.

“They’re in place, you notice that?” said George Koutsoubas, a Northridge insurance executive who was CIVICC’s executive vice chairman. “The people who can make it happen are now in place.”

*

Boland and Fiedler, who parted ways with Valley VOTE because of concerns that the group is too conciliatory, remain ardent supporters of secession and active leaders of the bid to create independent schools in the Valley. Boland is a member of one of the two commissions considering city charter reform, an effort supported by Riordan and one that Boland and others believe was triggered by the Valley secession movement.

“Looking back, I think Valley VOTE is just an extension of what was started by them. We were just able to move it ahead,” said Valley VOTE Chairman Richard Close. “The same issues that existed in the ‘70s still exist today, only they’re four times worse.”

CIVICC, however, never raised broad-based, grass-roots support within the Valley’s burgeoning communities, said Close, who at the time was president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. and still is today. One reason, Close said, was the makeup of CIVICC: business leaders from the northern end of the Valley.

CIVICC was the offspring of the Breakfast Forum, a gathering of Valley business and political leaders who discussed Valley-related legislation. Bernson created the group, which quickly became a required stop for Valley politicians.

Bernson and a handful of other forum members set up CIVICC, and commissioned a study in 1977 to see whether the Valley was getting its fair share of services from the city of Los Angeles.

The 17-page report, coordinated by Jackson Mayers, an economics instructor at Valley College, concluded that Valley residents contributed 40% of the city’s taxes and received only 15% of the city’s services.

The study has since been criticized as an inaccurate and simplistic analysis, but CIVICC used Mayers’ conclusions to further its movement to cleave the Valley from Los Angeles. The group wanted to follow the lead of San Francisco, creating a combination city-county government able to control all local tax dollars.

Los Angeles city leaders were not impressed. “It is difficult to take the secessionists seriously,” huffed Anton Calleia, an aide to then-Mayor Tom Bradley.

The Legislature made sure CIVICC’s brainchild never made it out of the crib.

*

A 1978 measure sponsored by Assemblyman John Knox (D-Richmond) required the Valley secession proposal to be approved by the Los Angeles City Council before it could become a reality.

“Giving the city veto power basically killed us,” Bernson said.

That’s how things stood until Paula Boland made it to the Legislature and in 1994 introduced a bill to eliminate the City Council’s veto power over secession.

Knox, now retired and living in Richmond, said the city veto was added after heavy lobbying by then-Los Angeles Tom Mayor Bradley. The League of California Cities, and leaders from San Jose, also pushed for the measure, since the secession requirements applied statewide, Knox said.

“The issue raised a lot of hell,” Knox said.

Ronald Deaton(cq), the chief legislative analyst for the city of Los Angeles, offers a different version of events. Deaton said the city of San Jose was the chief proponent of the veto measure, and L.A. officials only played a supporting role.

Still, CIVICC came close to getting what it wanted, almost convincing the tiny city of San Fernando to open its borders and swallow the million inhabitants of a breakaway Valley. Bernson, one of the main architects of the stealthy deal, said it unraveled when the city tried to “cherry pick” Granada Hills, Mission Hills and other affluent areas, leaving the rest of the Valley to fend for itself.

“That’s the double-cross that hurt the movement more than anything else,” Bernson recalls. “The lesson we learned from all this is that legislative bodies and individuals do not give up power easily.”

City Councilman Joel Wachs, who watched the events unfold from the council seat he has occupied since 1971, has an even more compelling observation.

*

During CIVICC’s secession movement, there was a strong undercurrent of racial tension; the Valley was predominantly a white, middle-class enclave trying to split from a more diverse city. Rumblings of racism, which CIVICC members said were untrue and unfair, were also fed by the fact that many of the group’s leaders opposed the school district’s busing program, intended to integrate city classrooms, Wachs said.

The Valley, which Wachs helps represent, is a much more diverse region today, and its racial and ethnic makeup closely mirrors the rest of Los Angeles, he said.

“I think there’s a great irony here,” Wachs said. “The more diverse the Valley has become, the greater the call for independence.

“The alienation driving this exists with all groups of people, and it doesn’t matter what color they are or where they live.”