Yaroslavsky Urges Cooperation Between City and Secessionists

Hoping to dramatically reduce the cost of studying San Fernando Valley secession, Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky on Wednesday unveiled a plan calling for increased cooperation between the city and the activists working to break up Los Angeles.

The group advocating secession, Valley VOTE, hailed the plan, saying it could trim millions from the cost of studying the municipal divorce, which had been estimated to run as high as $8 million. That figure was disclosed last month in a county analysis.

But the director of the Local Agency Formation Commission, which oversees the process, along with a county official who conducted a previous study and Yaroslavsky’s staff members, acknowledged that one of the proposal’s main assumptions is highly optimistic.

Yaroslavsky’s proposal is largely based on the premise that Los Angeles bureaucrats would hand over all the information needed to divide the city’s assets and liabilities in an easy-to-digest fashion.

By contrast, the county estimate was based on the commonly held assumption that the city would not be so helpful, and LAFCO would be forced to do a lot of number-crunching afterward.

“The [law] requires the city to give us the information we want,” said LAFCO Director Larry Calemine. “But it does not say how they have to provide that information, or even within what time frame.

“Of course, we’re smart too, and we’ll write the questions in a certain way to get the right answers,” he added. “But no one can really say what’s going to happen.”

City officials have declined to discuss such details regarding the breakup until supporters of Valley secession actually raise enough valid signatures to kick-start the process. Valley VOTE has turned in more than 200,000 for a study on secession, but they are still being verified by county elections officials. The results should be in next month.

If the study found secession was possible without hurting either side financially, the breakup would probably go before voters in 2002. It would require a majority vote from the entire city, not just the Valley.

Although the city’s cooperation in studying secession is a matter of dispute, everyone else involved in the issue said Yaroslavsky’s proposal was certain to reduce overall costs by narrowing the scope of the analysis.

That is because rather than studying the numerous divisions of property and personnel that could occur under the breakup, the proposal calls for Valley secession proponents to specify what they want a piece of and what type of government they want to run.

If Valley secessionists proposed sharing control of the Department of Water and Power through a joint powers agency, for example, there would be no need to study how to divide the nation’s largest publicly owned utility.

City officials would also be asked to respond with a list of issues they would like included in the analysis.

“If we now assume that it’s possible that not all of the assets will be valued, then it’s fair to say that all of the costs could be reduced to as [little] as $2 million to $3 million,” said Valley VOTE Chairman Richard Close.

Also on Wednesday, the consultants and county officials who conducted the previous analysis came up with a refocused estimate for the first stage of the study.

The consultants initially concluded that the first step of studying secession would cost up to $3 million--part of a total anticipated cost of $8 million--based on a review of all possible breakup drives.

On Wednesday, they released a slightly lower estimate of up to $2.6 million for that phase if only Valley secession were analyzed. Three-fourths of the costs are the same regardless of how many secessions are studied, they said.