San Gabriel Valley, Where Boundaries Border on Madness

If you drove down the center of Hurstview Avenue heading east, you would be in the city of Monrovia. But your passenger would be in Duarte.

Or hop on South Myrtle Avenue in Monrovia. As you cross Altern Street, you are under county jurisdiction for about half a mile. Pass Wayland Way and you return to Monrovia, but only for about 350 feet.

Then it’s back to the county again--for another three-eighths of a mile. Just before Myrtle crosses Live Oak Avenue, for good measure, you breeze through a few feet of Irwindale. A 2,000-foot return to Monrovia, a brief moment in Arcadia, then welcome to El Monte. There, said assistant to the city manager Scott Ochoa, “You can put your road map away. You’re good until you get past the 60 Freeway--I think.”

These kinds of boundary headaches afflict all of the 30 cities of the San Gabriel Valley to some degree or another. Small cities and chunks of unincorporated county land are clustered so tightly that it sometimes takes a road map to decide whose jurisdiction drivers--or back porches, for that matter--are in.

Take Newburgh Street, where two-thirds of the block is the city of Azusa, identifiable by the three-digit street numbers, and the middle third is an unincorporated “island,” where the street numbers are five digits.

Azusa police strictly enforce city codes that require careful property maintenance. The homes under their jurisdiction are well-tended; the ones under county authority often have unauthorized construction, trash and junk cars.

These cities are still paying for the days when annexation decisions were made with no regional perspective.

Their police forces sometimes have to struggle to clarify jurisdictional matters to residents who want to report fender-benders or barking dogs.

Take Monrovia’s Huntington Drive, east of Mountain Avenue. The center island is the dividing line, with the north side patrolled by Monrovia’s police department and the south by the county Sheriff’s Department, which polices Duarte.

Often, those who have the misfortune to have an accident there call Monrovia authorities. They are right or wrong, according to where the car is. Monrovia officers respond, but it’s not always their side of the street.

“We listen, then they have to tell the whole thing to the Sheriff’s Department again,” Monrovia Sgt. Richard Lukofnak said. “It’s more annoying for the citizens than the officers.”

Confused? Pity the poor residents of the Arrow Village and the Brookwood Apartment complexes in Azusa.

They live on Arrow Highway, but exactly where depends on whether you want to visit them or sell them phone or utility service.

If you’d like to visit, the residents of the two complexes are located at 955 and 1015 Arrow Highway, respectively. But if you try to send a bill there, you probably won’t get paid because, as far as the Postal Service is concerned, there is no such address.

According to the postal service, these same people live at 18537 and 18615 Arrow Highway in another city: Covina.

Those were the property addresses before the area, previously under the county’s jurisdiction, was annexed to Azusa in 1984.

When you move into one of those complexes, utility companies come to your home and install service, listing you in Azusa. But if you don’t warn them about your peculiar mailing address, your bills will end up back with the sender, who understandably may be inclined to terminate your service.

“Half the time the tenants don’t get their phone bills,” Brookwood manager Sharon Roberts said. “Something in the system keeps mailing to 955 rather than 18537.”

Brookwood distributes a letter to each renter detailing the difference between the mailing and service addresses.

Just to make sure all their bases are covered, both complexes have posted both city and county addresses in front of their properties.

The postal service says the problem was created by Azusa’s annexation and says it is under no obligation to make postal boundaries reflect city lines. Shifting delivery from the Covina post office to the Azusa post office would create workload problems, said spokeswoman Terri Bouffiou: You’d overload an Azusa carrier while underutilizing the current Covina carrier.

“Azusa insisting on having their own numbering system has created the confusion,” she said.

How in the world do cities get their boundaries, anyway? With land development, property values, laws and restrictions so dependent on where each town draws the line, who was keeping track of things while these absurdities occurred?

Nobody in particular, said Larry Calemine, executive officer of L.A. County’s Local Agency Formation Commission, an independent commission created by the Legislature in 1963 to handle the increasingly complex issues of overlapping jurisdictions.

“We’re very careful now. We work with the state Board of Equalization so there’s a master control in Sacramento,” he said. “We can no longer be drawing a jurisdiction line down the middle of a parcel when the house is on one side and the porch is on the other.”

Calemine was sympathetic to the problems created by the cities’ lingering boundary irregularities, and offered to try to help.

“If the jurisdictions want to sit down with LAFCO to fix these things, we’ll be glad to do that,” he said.