New City Promises to Be Anything but Retiring

There’ll be no harangues from militant parents over building soccer fields. No noisy demands on City Hall to stop the bulldozers and save the gnatcatcher. And certainly no crackdown on dope smoking behind the gym.

That’s exactly what the sociopolitical landscape looks like in the new city of Laguna Woods, where the average age is 77 and officials are more likely to be worried about wayward golf carts than banzai skateboarders.

But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing for politicians and bureaucrats to do in this, the nation’s first gated city for seniors and California’s 472nd municipality. Made up almost entirely of the Leisure World retirement community, it is only the fourth gated city in the state.

For starters, “our special needs include lift buses,” said Jim Thorpe, 63, and, because he was the top vote-getter for the City Council in Tuesday’s incorporation election, the acting mayor.

Then there’s making sure that the council meeting hall, wherever it may be, is reachable by seniors.

“A lot of people don’t have cars; they have golf carts and the bus system,” Thorpe said. “We’ll make sure the meetings are accessible by bus.”

Council meetings will be kept short. Well, shorter, at least--politicians being what they are.

Still, “we’re going to bring a new sense to government,” vowed Thorpe, who 25 years ago served as mayor of San Juan Capistrano. “And one of those things will be not to have meetings that run so long we don’t know what we’re meeting about at the end of them.”

Beyond that--and the obvious lack of need for a youth services department--Laguna Woods has no intention of acting like it’s a city of elder folks.

The council plans to coordinate with neighboring cities to attack the proposed commercial airport at the retiring El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. It will work to keep crime outside the gates, improve the transportation system, protect the area’s greenbelts and, very importantly, emphasize social services like health care and counseling.

Even so, try as it might, Laguna Woods clearly isn’t like any other city.

“Cities have a school,” said Dan Carrigg, legislative deputy of the League of California Cities. “They have children walking around. It’s unique from that point of view. It’s hard to think of a city where there is no school.”

Michael Pagano, a political science professor at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, said that because of the homogeneous population in Laguna Woods, it may be easier to reach a consensus on issues.

“If you have a diverse population, you have different kinds of demands and competition for scarce resources,” he said. “Do you put in a half-dozen soccer fields or a par-3 golf course? For a retirement community, that’s an easy call.”

Looking on with just a twinge of envy is Steve Dicterow, mayor of one of the most picturesque, charming and disaster-prone cities in the state, Laguna Beach.

For starters, he noted with a laugh, Laguna Woods won’t have to deal with the floods and fires that have ravaged his oft-repaired and oft-rebuilt community in the past five years.

And while Laguna Beach worries about the level of its police and fire protection, Laguna Woods probably will contract for those services with the county Sheriff’s Department and Fire Authority.

“They have fewer things of a grand scope than we do in Laguna Beach,” Dicterow said. “Sometimes the complexity of things is not so much fun.”

For the record, the community did, in fact, have a nasty flood last year, though it wasn’t of biblical proportions, like Laguna’s torrential mud bath.

Though it’s not exempt from the caprices of nature, Laguna Woods is fairly exempt from development and environmental battles, because it’s nearly built out.

Yet common demographics and political vision don’t make Laguna Woods exactly Pleasantville. The filament-thin margin of victory for cityhood shows the depth of division over the issue.

So the new city needs some peace and self-nurturing.

It also needs its novelty value to wear off. Television news crews and print reporters have descended on the community.

“We’ve even heard from the Japan Broadcast Co.,” said Thorpe, a retired mathematics professor who still teaches a class at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo.

But he sees signs of relief from the spotlight. “On the late news, Monica upstaged us,” he mused. “It’s good something else came along.”

Whether or not Laguna Woods fades from the headlines, the county is about to be fully introduced to the community’s political agenda.

When it was part of the county, the community spoke and was heard. Now, as its own city, officials expect they’ll be listened to a little more attentively.

“We’re going to deal out there with the world,” said Thorpe.