What’s Good for the City . . .

Members of Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment, the main group advocating San Fernando Valley secession from the rest of Los Angeles, have become champions of the public’s right to know. They want city officials to be open and aboveboard in releasing information required to study the effects of secession. Good for them.

The same group declines to reveal its own financial backers. Now, isn’t there something wrong with this picture?

The Local Agency Formation Commission, the panel charged with overseeing a municipal divorce, will require an unprecedented mass of data on city assets, debts, revenues and operations to study whether secession would harm either a new Valley city or the rest of Los Angeles. The study will in turn determine whether secession is put on the ballot.

LAFCO, understandably, wants to go to a point person for the information rather than going to all 37 city departments. Both Mayor Richard Riordan and City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski have volunteered ways the city can manage the data, the mayor through his office, Miscikowski through a City Council subcommittee.

But Valley VOTE leaders worry that either plan, given the strong feelings about secession, could allow behind-the-scene powers to stall or even reshape information needed for the commission--and the public--to make such a critical decision.

So why aren’t they concerned about the public’s need to know who is behind secession itself?

Valley VOTE has both the moral high ground and the law on its side in insisting the public has the right to public information. But they have only a loophole to thank for the secession movement not being covered by California campaign disclosure laws. Their only argument is that publicizing names could intimidate secession backers. Somehow that doesn’t stop initiative and referendum drives and candidates for office, all required to say who donated to their campaigns.

Valley VOTE’s most persuasive argument for the city to be open with information would be to be open itself.