Knight Tilts at L.A. County as Secession Fever Hits the High Desert

First there was school district breakup, then Valley secession from Los Angeles, and now the gods of divorce have turned their attention to the High Desert, where state Sen. William “Pete” Knight wants to cut away from Los Angeles and other counties to form the state’s 59th county.

Mostly, the break would be from L.A. County, where the region’s biggest cities, Palmdale and Lancaster, are located.

“We have to fight all of L.A. County for services,” Knight, a former Palmdale mayor, said Thursday. “We have one representative [county Supervisor Mike Antonovich] and the rest of the representatives don’t even know where we are.”

Not surprisingly, the idea has not met with the greatest enthusiasm among Los Angeles County officials, where the five county supervisors preside over the nation’s largest municipal government and a budget as big as the budgets of some sovereign nations.

Antonovich, in particular, came out against the new county, blasting the idea in a press release and saying that it would be too expensive for residents of the new county to set up their own sheriff, district attorney, fire, health and other departments.

“The problem facing our state’s 58 counties is not their size, but their dysfunctional financial structure,” Antonovich said. Antonovich said that if it weren’t for illegal aliens, L.A. County would have the money to provide better services to the High Desert and other areas.

Knight, meanwhile, plans to announce at a news conference today that he will introduce legislation to create the as-yet unnamed new county, which would have a population of between 600,000 and 800,000 people, depending on how long it takes to be established.

There is no indication yet whether Knight has support for his bill in Sacramento. If it doesn’t pass, the region will be forced to follow the route being slogged by those who wish to divorce the San Fernando Valley from the city of Los Angeles: gather enough signatures to prompt the regional agency that oversees such things to make a study of the idea, then obtain support from a majority of the voters in the entire county.

As for a name, High Desert comes to mind, of course. Or maybe it should just be called “Not L.A.”

Pursuing Paparazzi

In the wake of Princess Diana’s death and a recent judgment in favor of Arnold Schwarzenegger after he sued two photographers who chased the actor and his family in their car, Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-Simi Valley) has introduced a bill that would make such acts a federal crime.

The goal is to prevent dangerous pursuit behavior--often attributed to the celebrity press--that threatens or causes injury to any target of the tabloid or mainstream media or others, according to the four-page bill submitted Feb. 12.

“It does not impede anyone’s ability to get the news or take photos,” said Laura Woolfrey, a spokeswoman for Gallegly. “It simply protects people from being put in physical danger.”

Sen. Dianne Feinstein is preparing similar legislation.

Gallegly’s “Personal Privacy Protection Act of 1998” is aimed at “a very small, but also a very dangerous group,” he said in a statement.

The bill states that violators would be punished if the image or recording they pursued was for commercial purposes, and if the victim had “a reasonable expectation of privacy,” took “reasonable steps to ensure that privacy” and feared death or injury.

The bill stipulates that defendants would not be off the hook even if “no image or recording was captured” during the dangerous pursuit. Instead, the pursuit itself would be enough of a violation.

Hearings on the proposed legislation are expected in the “near future,” Woolfrey said.

Down to Business

This week’s City Council meeting in Encino had something of a photo-opportunity air to it. The council agenda was light. The council members, instead of facing each other as usual, faced the audience like players on “The Hollywood Squares.” And politicking, rather than city business, was the order of the day.

Council members Hal Bernson and Laura Chick took the prize for turning an ostensibly ordinary meeting into campaign appearances. When their colleague Richard Alarcon introduced a motion to help laundermats cover sewer costs, Chick and Bernson seized the chance to stump for an unrelated issue: sewer charges to Valley homeowners.

Both apparently judged that this pocketbook issue would play well with the assembled group.

Bernson professed himself outraged at what he said are Valley residents’ sky-high bills for sewer service.

“I’m really very concerned about it,” he said, adding--with a nod to the secessionists in the room--that such inequities were good reason to question city government. Chick chimed in with her own reassurances that the city was looking for “a fair and equitable solution.”

The Endorsement Game

It’s four months before the June primary elections, but endorsements in the race to succeed state Sen. Herschel Rosenthal (D-Van Nuys) have already begun to roll in.

Rosenthal is forced by term limits to give up the post he has held for 16 years.

This week, a top candidate for the seat, Councilman Alarcon, won the endorsement of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, the labor union that represents the nearly 10,000 rank-and-file members of the LAPD.

Endorsements usually don’t mean much when the candidates are well known, as is the case with Alarcon, who has been a Valley fixture for many years. Endorsements usually help more when voters don’t know much about the candidate.

But support of the Police Protective League may be significant because members usually campaign door-to-door for their favored candidates.

Alarcon’s top challenger, former Assemblyman Richard Katz, has already secured the endorsement of Rosenthal and Rep. Howard Berman (D-Mission Hills).

This week, Katz announced that he, too, had the backing of law enforcement, in the form of an endorsement from Sheriff Sherman Block.

Return to Sender

When Katz challenged other candidates for Rosenthal’s seat to abide by an ethics code which he devised, he got a little more than he bargained for.

Katz urged his opponents to sign his “Code of Fair Campaign Practices,” and pledged to abide by it.

But according to GOP candidate Ollie M. McCaulley, Katz may already be in violation.

Katz sent the challenge to each candidate by certified mail. But McCaulley said Katz had misspelled his name and incorrectly assumed that he is a woman.

“I am in receipt of your letter dated Feb. 3, 1998, in which you pledge not to misrepresent the facts regarding your opponents,” McCaulley responded. “Curiously, the letter repeatedly misspelled my name and misrepresented my gender.”

Instead of accepting the campaign code challenge, McCaulley asked Katz to face him in a debate next month.

McCaulley signed the letter: “Sincerely, Mr. (not Ms.) Ollie M. McCaulley (not McCauley).”

The Buck Stops Here

With all the turmoil in Washington over former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr and possible hostilities with Iraq, it’s a wonder that politicians can agree on anything.

But most Democrats and Republicans agree that the Internal Revenue Service must be reigned in.

Now the debate is on how to accomplish that.

Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-Santa Clarita) came up with an idea after hosting hearings in Santa Clarita and the Antelope Valley to hear taxpayers’ tales of IRS abuses.

Last week he introduced legislation to require the IRS to obtain permission from an independent panel before seizing a taxpayer’s property.

The three-member panel would be made up of a tax attorney, a certified public accountant and a third member, either an attorney, a CPA or an enrolled agent. The members would be appointed by the IRS district director, the state bar and the Society of the Certified Public Accountants.

The panel would also be able to block levies on property and wages if a majority should find that other means of collecting the unpaid taxes, such as installment payments, are more appropriate.

The idea came from Lancaster attorney William Walsh.

“While police must obtain a warrant before searching someone’s home . . . there is nobody to make sure the IRS obeys the rules before they deprive people of their property,” McKeon said.

Times correspondent Tom Schultz in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.