Newest City Council Works the Holiday

Rancho Santa Margarita held a brief but symbolic City Council meeting Saturday afternoon to mark its first day of cityhood.

“It was really exciting,” said Debra H. Clark, who was elected mayor, as expected. “It’s the culmination of four years of work and planning. You think about when it will happen, but here it really happened.”

Voters in the master-planned community of 44,000 near Mission Viejo approved incorporation and voted in five council members in November.

About 40 people attended the meeting at the Trabuco Canyon Water District, which lasted a scant 20 minutes. “We had quite a few people there, especially considering that it was New Year’s Day,” Clark said.

The council had only one item on its agenda--a consent calendar that covered a series of mundane actions: swearing in the council; arranging liability insurance; adopting ordinances for police and fire protection; and arranging collection of sales and gasoline taxes.

Regular meetings will take place at 7 p.m. on the first and third Thursdays of the months. However, council members decided to hold this first meeting Saturday rather than wait until Jan. 6 to avoid an insurance or emergency service lapse. A formal swearing-in ceremony will take place Jan. 20 at St. John’s School.

Symbolism was another reason to hold Rancho Santa Margarita’s first meeting on New Year’s Day, the city’s birthday.

“That’s a great feeling,” Councilman Gary Thompson said. “It’s something the community can be able to look back on and say we did something at the beginning of a new millennium.”

Rancho Santa Margarita, Orange County’s 33rd city, missed being the first new city of the new year in the nation by an hour.

Holiday Cottonwood, Utah, also became a city at 12:01 a.m. Saturday. But the time difference meant it was officially incorporated an hour before Rancho Santa Margarita, Thompson said.

Regardless, Thompson said the meeting was important because it added a sense of closure to the hard-fought effort to become a city.

“The election put it in place, but today was the capper,” he said.