Groups Plot Escape From L.A.

Taking their cue from Valley VOTE, residents from communities outside the San Fernando Valley on Saturday plotted their own strategies to break away from Los Angeles.

Activists interested in exploring secession represented areas that included West Los Angeles, South-Central, Eagle Rock, San Pedro, Wilmington, Westchester, Mar Vista, Marina del Rey, Playa del Rey, Villa Marina and Venice.

The community representatives talked strategy with Jeff Brain, president of Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment, at the group’s Ventura Boulevard headquarters.

During the nearly three-hour session, Brain advised the breakup backers on how best to navigate a course that ultimately could lead to dismantling the nation’s second-largest city.

Brain told the activists about how to build a consensus among competing interests, gain support from power brokers in Sacramento and grass-roots organizations, and draft and circulate petitions.

As Valley VOTE has discovered, other activists may find that collecting signatures is the most difficult aspect of a secession campaign.

Gov. Pete Wilson on Wednesday signed legislation giving Valley VOTE an additional three months to gather signatures on its petition for a study to break away from Los Angeles.

Without Sacramento’s intervention, the fate of the Valley movement appeared uncertain. Valley VOTE said it had collected about 137,000 signatures, technically enough to launch the study, but about 20% fewer than the cushion the group wanted as insurance against the invalidation of signatures.

The new deadline is Nov. 27, which the group says is enough time to collect the additional signatures.

At Saturday’s meeting, Brain also instructed the community representatives on how to answer skeptics’ questions regarding taxation and municipal services, deal with the media, motivate volunteers, create an Internet Web site and make posters and fliers to get the word out about their secession campaigns.

“We were giving them the benefit of our experience,” Brain said after the meeting.

“It is important for them to stay united and move forward, because we are keeping pressure on the city as a whole to reform itself and explore options,” he said. “[The city] will be better because we have these efforts throughout the city. It is important to know what other groups are feeling, and that it’s not just us.”

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Although the leaders of the secession movement, collectively called the Alliance for Self-Determination, have met regularly for two years, their efforts have taken on greater meaning now that Valley VOTE is in the final phase of its petition drive.

“We are waiting for you to be successful, so that we can be successful,” said Howard Bennett, co-chairman of HarborVote, which is seeking a cityhood feasibility study for the communities of San Pedro and Wilmington.

To be successful, the organizations must draft a petition and collect the required number of signatures from registered voters living within the proposed new city.

If a petition drive is successful, the Local Agency Formation Commission would study the viability of the new city and its impact on the remaining city of Los Angeles. If LAFCO decided to place the issue on the ballot, the proposal would have to win the approval of a majority of voters in Los Angeles as well as in the proposed new city before it could become a separate community.

“We are in line to start,” said Bennett. “Once Valley VOTE’s petition drive is over, we will be ready to start ours.”

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Similarly, a representative of the Westside Cityhood Coalition said it is gearing up to launch its petition drive in January.

“Many voters say they like L.A., but they hate the city government,” said David Tuttle of the Westside Cityhood Coalition. “We are giving them a chance to stay in L.A., but in West L.A.”

That proposed city would extend from Mulholland Drive south to include Los Angeles International Airport, and from Pacific Palisades east to include Hollywood, he said.

Adrian Dove, president of the California chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, a national civil rights organization, said South-Central residents are taking a position of “active passivity.”

“We are looking to see what happens after the Valley peels off,” he said. “What is remaining will be a smaller, more viable city that is simply called Los Angeles.”

* CHARTER REFORM: The elected commission deadlocked on a proposal to expand the City Council. B6