The Drive to Secede

Initiating what could become one of the most significant developments in the city’s history, hundreds of volunteers have begun gathering signatures for a petition drive that could eventually detach the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles and form it into its own municipality.

Although many of those involved in the petition drive see it as an informational effort, one which initiates a study that will help determine if Valley cityhood is viable, others see it as the beginning of a full-fledged secession movement. One of those is Richard Close, longtime president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. and co-chair of Valley VOTE (Voters Organized Toward Empowerment), the group behind the signature gathering effort. Members of the group generally view the city as unresponsive to the needs of local citizens and say the Valley doesn’t receive its fair share of services.

On the other side of the issue is Mike Feuer, a Los Angeles city councilman whose district encompasses portions of the Valley and Westside. While conceding that there is a growing sense of distance between residents and their elected representatives, Feuer is a supporter of city charter reform and favors that approach over a breakup of the city. The Times recently spoke to both of them about the secession effort.

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Question: Secessionists say the San Fernando Valley gets shortchanged on allocation of resources and is often ignored by City Hall. Is there any truth to their charges?

Mike Feuer: It is fair for people throughout the city, and certainly in the Valley, to say government has not been responsive. There are allocations of resources that may be skewed in one direction or another. We don’t find elected officials and the bureaucracies as accountable as they should be. Where is our tax money going? Why aren’t our streets paved more often? There’s a feeling of distance from government and a lack of efficacy in government. This is something government must address or we frankly are abdicating some of our most important responsibilities.

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Q: Most of the people advocating secession would agree with you on those points. How do you differ with them?

Feuer: I differ on the means. I introduced on the council floor the idea of pursuing charter reform in a very vigorous way. To merely split the city in two will not be effective because, unless you address the fundamentals of how government works on a day-to-day basis, a city such as the Valley, which would be the sixth-largest in the country, is not going to work any better than a city such as Los Angeles. I consider secession in itself sort of a superficial response to those deeper problems, because I haven’t heard anybody talk about how government will be reorganized to deal with them. The danger in secession is in false expectations. It raises expectations that can’t be satisfied, unless we address fundamentals. And if we dissipate our energy talking about a superficial response, I think we lose a real chance.

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Q: Those are philosophical concerns. What about real nut-and-bolt issues?

Feuer: There is strength in the interdependence of Los Angeles’ neighborhoods. I think the city as a whole benefits because Los Angeles is a big player when it comes to seeking resources in Sacramento or in Washington, for example. We matter enough that we’re able to bring to our constituents resources for certain services that otherwise might not be available. Additionally, there have been a number of concerns raised regarding water supply. The allocation of police resources is another question. For example, the Department of Water and Power in the upcoming budget is slated to devote more than $100 million to the general fund in a transfer of funds. That’s money that will enable us to put police on the street. That subsidy could be absent if secession took place.

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Q: Those considerations notwithstanding, don’t smaller cities operate more efficiently than larger ones?

Feuer: One of the arguments for secession is that smaller cities in the metropolitan Los Angeles area have happier constituents. And in some cases, I think that may be true. But those cities benefit enormously from the fact that the large city of Los Angeles is immediately adjacent to them. As a result of that large city, there are dramatically larger numbers of tourists that come to the region and don’t spend their money based on jurisdictional boundaries. The region benefits from the fact that Los Angeles operates a large airport and a large harbor. There are huge economic development consequences that we know transcend jurisdictional boundaries. The fact that LAX is here makes the entertainment industry in Burbank all the more effective. So I think it’s too simplistic to assume that things seem better in smaller cities, so if we broke the city up into a number of small cities and there were no Los Angeles anymore, the world would be a better place. Additionally, there’s been a lot of contention around airport expansion and development issues in Burbank. Those issues are inherent in living in a metropolitan area where you have competition for land use, for scarce resources. We need to contend with how to make that competition less contentious and make the discussion much more inclusive, no matter how the city breaks up or is retained as a single structure. I just prefer to recognize that those underlying, fundamental issues aren’t going to be addressed merely by secession, and we ought to be addressing them because no matter what size the city is, people are going to feel discontented if they’re out of the loop.

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Q: Rewriting the city charter is seen by many as a viable alternative to secession. Have you seen any positive signs yet from the commissions studying charter reform?

Feuer: Giving more authority to the mayor is a good idea. Making the council most fundamentally a legislative body is a good idea. Increasing the number of City Council members so that we’ll have fewer constituents, and as a consequence can be better in touch with them, is a good idea. Neighborhood councils are a very important idea. Some people have trivialized the idea of neighborhood councils. But I think we should be giving neighborhood councils genuine authority. One approach I proposed, for example, in regard to land-use issues, is that neighborhood councils should have unilateral discretion over neighborhood planning issues. If a council seeks to assume jurisdiction because they believe the matter to be of regional significance, that could happen. I have two neighborhood councils in my district. I’ve given them a great deal of authority to focus on community quality-of-life priorities, and they’ve been extremely effective.

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Q: How do you envision neighborhood councils operating?

Feuer: I’m a fan of making the units relatively small. I think that if a neighborhood council’s boundaries are too big, you end up trying to be all things to everybody, and the whole point of neighborhood councils is to focus on a defined neighborhood’s concerns. So I believe there could be more than 100 neighborhood councils in this city. In our existing districts, there might be between 5 and 7 councils. Further, you can’t have a neighborhood council comprised solely of property owners, or commercial property owners or somebody else. One has to have residents, commercial property owners, merchants, educators, social service providers, law enforcement, all sitting at the table together, because those are the kinds of collaborative discussions that otherwise almost never happen in the city. And if you’re going to create a system under which neighborhood decisions reflect what’s best for the neighborhood as a whole, you can’t skew the membership too much to one perspective or another.

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Q: Why has there been a breakdown in the delivery of city services?

Feuer: The city budget is focused principally on public safety. Fire, police, comprise 70% of the budget. Once you add sanitation it’s about 75%. So every other service in the city comes from that remaining 25%. That is how our electorate wants the city services prioritized. Public safety first. And it’s reflected in the way we make decisions. But the financial pie has not expanded. Only now with the resurgence of the economy will we in the next couple of years begin to see more money infused into the city coffers. But now, you end up with 150 streets in the city being repaved annually, which is a tiny percentage of the 6,700 miles of streets we have. We end up with no sidewalk repairs to speak of at all. There’s no money to do anything except superficial asphalt repairs. But I think that as we put neighborhood councils in place, that they need to have a role in helping prioritize, on a very specific, localized basis, what kinds of services ought to be infused first.

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Q: How would that work?

Feuer: The budgeting process has for too long largely excluded neighborhoods, and I think that needs to change. The mayor proposes the budget, then the City Council has a short period in which to review it, and then it has to be approved or not. It goes to the mayor to veto or not. That approach pretty much locks out any meaningful neighborhood participation. I think the budget process should begin with public hearings around the city earlier. I think neighborhood councils should be able to weigh in regarding where they think the key priorities in the city are, and, that would, I think, better inform some of the judgments that are made down the road.

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Q: So in your view, neighborhood councils could help end the sense of alienation some citizens feel?

Feuer: Neighborhood councils themselves cannot be service deliverers. But what they can be is involved in the process of identifying which services ought to be prioritized in their neighborhood and then involved in helping to provide information on whether the service is being delivered efficiently or not. So we evaluate the performance of general managers, deciding whether to retain them, let alone give them pay increases.

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Q: Petitions that begin the process that could eventually lead to secession have begun circulating. And a recent poll conducted by Valley VOTE indicates a great deal of interest in the secession question by Valley residents. In view of this, do you think the city needs to do a better job of selling charter reform as an alternative?

Feuer: I think it’s premature to sell charter reform per se. It is not premature for us to sell the idea of participating in the process of charter reform. And if you notice, around the city there have been an increasing number of people involved in coming to charter commission hearings and weighing in on what they care about. I’ve always thought that the actual process of debating charter reform, for getting the results, is a good thing for a city like Los Angeles to be engaged in. But by and large, the city has done a very bad job of communicating the way the government can improve, and has allowed, to some extent, the naysayers to occupy the field. And that does need to change. When one allows the most divisive voices to occupy the field, I think that we do a disservice to all of us.