An Ax Over Los Angeles

The genie is out of the bottle. The Los Angeles County registrar-recorder confirmed this week that more than 25% of San Fernando Valley voters signed a petition demanding a municipal divorce from Los Angeles. Now begins the expensive and divisive task of tallying civic assets before voters citywide decide whether to take a sledgehammer to the nation’s second-largest city. In their well-intentioned quest for better government, voters could destroy a great city. There are better ways to fix government than by smashing it apart.

Dismemberment is the goal of secessionists such as Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment, or VOTE, the group responsible for collecting the signatures of 132,480 voters--many of them fed up with the way Los Angeles is run. It was quite a feat, aided in no small part by an army of mercenaries paid for each signature they collected. The response exposes the dissatisfaction that Los Angeles residents rightly feel with their city government. That indignation can manifest itself in constructive ways--as it did with the charter reform movement that recently produced a new blueprint for government in Los Angeles. Or it can give birth to destructive crusades like secession, a movement that started in the Valley but has spread across the city.

The next few years will be critical to the very survival of Los Angeles. Under the complicated laws governing secession, VOTE’s petition launches a multimillion-dollar study. Politics are likely to rule the process as VOTE presents its vision of a new Valley city and the elected officials on the board of the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO) try to reconcile that vision with fiscal reality. Before voters can decide on secession, it must be shown that breaking the city apart would not hurt the finances of either the new municipality or what’s left of Los Angeles.

That’s not a simple accounting problem. It’s a costly political process wherein truth might play a distant second to individual agendas. Voters got a taste of that with VOTE’s petition drive. Although the group claimed to want nothing more than a study of Valley secession, its foot soldiers pitched the unproven virtues of a new Valley city. Now that the signatures are collected and verified, VOTE is plainly calling for secession.

Who pays for the LAFCO study remains to be seen. Everyone from the City Council and the Board of Supervisors to VOTE agrees on who’s responsible: Someone else. The costs of the study--which could be as high as $8 million--should be shared equally by the city, the county and VOTE. But what will any of it accomplish in the end? The LAFCO study measures the quantitative and bureaucratic aspects of government: How much tax does the city collect in a given area? How much does it spend? It does not--and cannot--measure the all-important qualitative aspects. Will local leaders be any more responsive than they are now? Will residents notice?

An improved city does not come from signing a petition and waiting for change. Los Angeles could have more responsive governance today. Until voters have exercised a willingness to make a better place of the city they already have, they should think twice about creating another one.