Larry Calemine

The breakup of the city of Los Angeles is a large decision that will be left in the hands of a small agency, the Local Agency Formation Commission.

But that formidable task doesn’t seem to faze LAFCO’s executive director, Larry Calemine, who, while conceding that the task at hand is “complex . . . but not complicated” also acknowledges that there hasn’t been anything like it in recent history.

LAFCO, with a staff of four, normally goes about adjusting boundaries of water and sanitation districts. Now it is being asked to rule on the breakup of the nation’s second largest city.

For that breakup to happen, the LAFCO study must find that secession would be “revenue neutral,” meaning that it could not cost the Valley or the rest of Los Angeles any extra money, or make a profit for either. If that can be shown, the matter would then be submitted to the city’s voters.

The Times recently talked to Calemine about the job at hand.

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Question: Why has the task of ruling on the breakup of the city of Los Angeles fallen to LAFCO?

Answer: LAFCO is an independent commission created by the state Legislature and it has quasi-legislative powers. All local governments, whether they’re cities or special districts, are creatures of state legislatures. The state Constitution grants the state Legislature the ability to create local governments, un-create them, modify them and so on. In 1963, the state Legislature created LAFCOs, one in each county of the state, and granted them the power to deal with boundary issues.

What you call a breakup is, by government code, referred to as a special reorganization. A special reorganization is defined as the detachment of a territory from a city and its simultaneous incorporation into its own new city. We have two applications before LAFCO now, one for the San Fernando Valley and one for the Harbor [area], which we are processing. The state Legislature, in creating LAFCOs, also created a whole body of legislative law on how LAFCO should conduct itself and how it proceeds and processes applications for reorganizations, special reorganizations and operations. And so given that mandate and those directions in the government code, we process these applications.

Q: Have you ever done anything of this magnitude before?

A: There’s been nothing of this magnitude done in the state of California or this country since the Civil War.

Q: Given that, is there adequate direction on how to go about this? Will you be flying blind?

A: No, we’re not flying blind at all. It’s not a complicated process. It’s a complex process, by the very nature of the items we have to deal with, but not complicated. The government code lays out the fact that the executive officer will prepare a comprehensive fiscal analysis. And it pretty much outlines what that analysis has to contain. The executive officer then makes its report and recommendations to the commission. The commission will then hold public hearings, and then will render a decision.

Q: And once that decision is rendered, that’s it?

A: Yes, because the commission acts on behalf of the state Legislature, there is no appeal except through the courts.

Q: Given the size of this undertaking, is your current staff big enough to work on this?

A: We will be hiring a consultant, people with the expertise in the various avenues that need to be researched.

Q: Some $2.65 million has been allocated for the study. How will that money be used?

A: Out of that money we need to pay the consultant. We need to have money available for environmental studies; the first step will be an initial study and that may indicate we need to do more. We need to have money set aside for special outside legal counsel; some issues may come up like water rights and a few other things like that. We need to have money for any special studies that come up by virtue of what we uncover, and we need to have money for project management.

Q: Is that enough money given the enormity of the situation?

A: I keep hearing the [word] “enormity,” and it is a sizable job, but it’s sizable only by the numbers. The city has a budget of $4.1 billion for the upcoming year. So what is our task? If you’re spending $4.1 billion, tell us where you’re spending it. And tell us where you’re receiving it, all the sources of income, all the sources of expenditures. Now let’s look at those and see how we can make some sense out of them. And if we were to do a breakup, or recommend a breakup, how can you deal with it? That’s not an enormous issue. It’s a data collection issue.

Contrary to what one reads in the paper, our job is not to see whether the Valley has been getting shortchanged or not. Our job is, essentially what I described. It’s essentially a divorce. How do we divide this?

Q: How long is it going to take to complete this study?

A: This job will take no longer than 18 to 24 months, assuming that all the parties respond to our request for information in a diligent fashion. A government code clearly grants LAFCO the authority to request information from any governmental agency, the city included, and they must supply us with the information we seek. It doesn’t say how long they can take to supply it to us, or in what form they supply it to us. But we have been assured by the mayor, and we have a written letter from him, that they will be cooperative and I have no reason to believe they won’t be.

But let’s assume, for some reason, there’s a delay. Whether that delay is caused because some individual in the Valley or the Harbor filed a lawsuit, whether the city files a lawsuit, or the applicant files a lawsuit, whatever the case may be, there may be a delay that we can’t anticipate. And let’s assume I’m 18, 19 months down the road, we’re almost finished and now we’re delayed and we’re beyond the 24-month contract period, and the consultant says, “I don’t want to have anymore part of this. My contract’s up, I’m gone.” I don’t have a finished product. Starting over would be a terrible waste of taxpayers’ money. So we have built in two two-year extensions to protect the taxpayers’ money in the event there are delays that we cannot foresee and which are not caused by us.

Q: If the city is providing all the data for this study, what does the applicant bring to this process?

A: The government code does not place the burden on the applicant to do anything more than file an application. Notwithstanding that, we can’t operate in a vacuum. So once we gather data from the city, we have a chance of looking that data over and trying to put it into a comprehensible fashion. We’ll put together various kinds of scenarios. And then we’ll present it to the applicants, and say, “Here’s what we’ve done so far. What do you think about it?”

By way of example, the city has numerous assets, from paper clips to buildings. Part of our data collection will be to ask the city to give us a list of all their assets. Tell us what your value of those assets are. And tell us by what method you value those assets.

Now, LAFCO can do a number of things. We can go out and hire appraisers to do fair-market appraisals. That would take five years and $5 million probably. So we will take that list of assets and say to the applicants, “These are the assets the city has provided us with and their method of evaluation. Tell us what you disagree with. What you agree with is off the table. We will focus on what you disagree with and determine what we consider a fair asset value.” My point is, there’s a way we can simplify the process and speed up the process. And keep the cost down if people will cooperate. If they’re uncooperative, then we have to operate in a vacuum.

Q: Are you being subjected to a lot of lobbying pressure about this decision?

A: People talk to you all the time. You can’t go anyplace without the subject not being raised by somebody. But intense pressure or lobbying? No, we haven’t seen that yet. Will we see it? Who knows? It doesn’t mean anything, quite frankly. Our job is to protect all the stakeholders. The city government and the applicants aren’t the only stakeholders here. Every citizen in the city of Los Angeles is a stakeholder.

Bob Rector is opinion editor of the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County editions of The Times.