Day Had Good Signs for Petition

For Steve Pearl--a lawyer who spent Tuesday in the hot sun, clipboard in hand--collecting signatures for a study of San Fernando Valley secession from primary voters was like shooting fish in a barrel.

“Most people are eager to sign,” said the curly haired, 33-year-old Valley native, wearing his office garb and carrying an ill-fitting red-white-and-blue plastic campaign hat outside a Studio City precinct. “My pitch is just, ‘Would you like to sign the petition?’ ”

As the afternoon wore on, Pearl was proved right again and again--a story repeated at other Valley polling places where members of the group Valley VOTE sought to jump-start their campaign on election day.

With only a few exceptions, the people Pearl stopped signed without questions. A few pondered, but only briefly.

“I thought I’d wait until they do a little more study,” said white-haired Rae Lynn, a retired Studio City publicist, thoughtfully scanning the petition Pearl thrust toward her before climbing into her Camaro.

But when Pearl reassured her that a study is what the petition calls for, Lynn amiably took up the pen and became Pearl’s 71st signature of the day.

Claiming to have workers at 250 Valley polling places, representatives of the cityhood group Valley VOTE took to the sidewalks, capitalizing on the stream of voters Tuesday’s primary offered on the fourth day of the petition drive.

The election-day signature drive “was planned early for early in our petition drive to give us a boost,” said Valley VOTE President Jeff Brain, “and we believe it gave us the boost we were looking for.”

Brain said no signature tally will be taken for several more days--the petitions have been on the street only since Saturday--but he said the volunteers were reporting good results.

“There’s not too many questions--people seem to know what it’s about,” said volunteer Wendy Cottone, who was standing down the street from Pearl outside Carpenter Avenue School in Studio City.

Cottone, a 29-year-old Glendale restaurant owner, said she spent the day shading herself with a campaign sign and trolling for signatures because, “I wanted to get involved in something historic. And this is historic.”

Valley VOTE is required to collect 135,000 signatures--25% of Valley voters--to get an independent regional panel called the Local Agency Formation Commission to conduct a study of economic effects of the creation of a Valley city separate from L.A.

If the study shows that the Valley could sustain itself as an independent municipality without hurting Los Angeles, the county Board of Supervisors will put a secession measure on a citywide ballot. A majority of voters in both the Valley and the entire city must approve the measure for passage.

Willie Harris spent the day hawking the petition under the shade of a jacaranda tree outside Sun Valley Junior High.

He had collected more than 100 signatures by 4:30 p.m. Many signers told stories about calls for city service being ignored: trees that went untrimmed, sidewalks that stayed broken for months. Several people asked Harris whether a Valley city would be more like Burbank.

“It’ll make things better, like Burbank, right?” asked Antonio Ramirez, a 41-year-old chef.

Even a Los Angeles city employee was eager to sign the petition. Jacquie Cardenas, a 25-year-old customer service representative with the Department of Water and Power, said she didn’t know whether she favored a split but was definitely interested in finding out more.

“From seeing what goes on, it’s too out of hand for Los Angeles to handle,” she said. “The phones are overwhelmed. Customers call in and they’re always getting an answering machine.”

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In Mission Hills, Benny Bernal, a school bus driver, staked out a piece of sidewalk roughly 100 feet from the polling station to gather signatures. “It’s been easy,” he said. “I’m not even asking a lot of them.”

Art Ortiz, 35, a driver for UPS, said he doesn’t keep up on politics and had heard little of the secession study. But “Los Angeles is too big,” he said. “There are holes in the streets in Pacoima, where I live, that L.A. would never let [happen] in Encino.”

A few refused to sign petitions. Pearl, the Studio City lawyer, said one man told him he opposed secession because it would hurt South-Central L.A.

Cynthia Alvarez, 21, stopped by a petitioner in Sun Valley, said: “If we were cut from the city, we wouldn’t get as much aid.”

Willie Harris, another volunteer, said one elderly woman demurred, saying, “I was born in L.A., I’ve lived my life in L.A., and I’m going to die in L.A.”

This story was written by staff writer Leovy from reports filed by staff writer Miller and correspondent Steinman.