Breaking Up Is Hard to Do, L.A. Inventory Finds

Imagine the divorce of one of the wealthiest couples on Earth. The spouses must count their billions of dollars in assets--the cars, yachts and homes, the plates, glasses and silverware--and divvy them up, piece by piece.

Now, imagine a city breaking apart. It must decide what every fire truck, traffic signal and water main is worth and devise a way to split it all up.

This summer, that task is consuming scores of Los Angeles officials who are quietly laying the groundwork for what could be the colossal divorce of the San Fernando Valley from the city it joined in 1915.

For years, city leaders have mulled over the grand challenges posed by Valley secession. Can the Police or Fire Department be chopped apart? How could a new Valley city get its water and power without relying on Los Angeles?

But now, the painstaking research project has shifted its focus to the mind-boggling array of smaller complications in slicing apart the nation’s second-largest city.

Workers are gathering a mountain of charts, memos, maps and computer files that planning experts will pore through to create a blueprint for the possible dismantling of Los Angeles. Parking meters and power lines, stop signs and swimming pools--they are cataloging nearly everything the city owns.

“Ultimately, it will be the most complete picture of the city government in its history,” said Ellen Sandt, who is supervising the unprecedented project for the city Office of Administrative and Research Services.

When it’s done, the study will determine whether a secession proposal can be put before voters.

Who would control the city’s art collection? How about the thousands of rare books downtown at the Central Library? Could the Valley keep, say, a 1909 first edition of Jack London’s “Martin Eden” in Canoga Park?

“This has forced us to take a careful look at everything we operate, and have, and take care of, and to think in very practical, down-to-earth terms about what you would do if the voters approved secession,” Sandt said.

Open up the cardboard boxes stuffed with the data collected so far, and the vast scope of potential problems is quickly apparent.

Take a look at the pile of Kafkaesque staff organization charts. In no time, you’re lost in a maze of thousands upon thousands of jobs.

All of them would have to be apportioned among the Valley, the area around the Los Angeles Harbor, where residents have also petitioned for the secession study, and what’s left of Los Angeles.

Carpenters, plumbers, welders and crossing guards. Helicopter mechanics. Traffic sign painters. Nurses, lawyers, telephone operators. Police psychologists.

Electricians to fix street lights. Wharfingers to assign harbor berths. Geologists to inspect dams, highways and transmission towers. Clerks. Typists. Stenographers.

More clerks. More typists. More stenographers.

And cooks.

“One of the benefits of this study is that we’re going to finally know how many cooks the city employs,” said Richard Close, chairman of the Valley VOTE secession group. “Maybe we need those cooks. Maybe we don’t. But now we’re realizing we have these cooks on staff.”

Valley VOTE board member Walter Prince said: “We’ve been screaming for data for years, and you just can’t get it. They stonewall, or they just don’t have it.”

The vexing task of making sense of the job charts--and the endless reams of other documents--falls to the Local Agency Formation Commission for Los Angeles County.

It has requested the data for a secession study that it plans to release in the fall. The study’s key goals are to determine whether secession is possible without harming residents in the new or old cities, and if so, to lay out the cheapest and least disruptive plan for breaking apart Los Angeles.

The commission could put a proposed divorce settlement before voters as soon as November 2002. To pass, it must be separately approved by a majority of voters in the Valley and in the city as a whole.

For now, agencies are digging up raw materials for the study and hauling them by the dolly load to the city clerk’s office.

The Bureau of Sanitation, one of the first to ante up, has produced an exhaustive inventory of its unsightly belongings, from sludge screens and sewage tanks to turbines and chain-link fences.

Many are priced to the dollar, some to the penny. A tangle of sewer pipes beneath Saticoy Street in Winnetka is listed at $1,022,667. A hunk of valves at the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant in Playa del Rey is priced at $271,459.64. The agency’s inventory tracking system automatically assigns prices to nearly everything it owns.

Not every agency is so meticulous.

The Cultural Affairs Department owns more than 2,000 works of art, but is unsure of where many of them are, much less how much they’re worth. The ones it knows about include plein-air paintings by Edgar Payne and Kathryn Leighton, a Japanese chariot once displayed in the City Hall rotunda, and an abstract sculpture by Arnaldo Pomodoro, a gift from Italy.

Roella Hsieh Louie, the arts manager who oversees the collection, said it’s worth millions of dollars. But the city has no clue to how many millions.

“The exact number, I couldn’t even begin to tell you,” she said.

Twelve of the sculptures, paintings, prints and photos are on display at the City Hall office of Councilwoman Laura Chick of Reseda. Museum-style labels identify each work. Above one file cabinet hangs a bicycle wheel stuffed with newspaper spray-painted yellow: “Untitled” by James Silvester, dated 1972.

To some advocates of Valley independence, such cultural treasures carry little appeal.

“I think I’d rather have the cash, personally,” said former U.S. Rep. Bobbi Fiedler of Northridge.

Secession, she added, “should be approached just like a divorce,” with strict columns of pluses and minuses for each side.

“They can’t keep the good and saddle us with just the trash,” she said.

Chick, however, would like the Valley city to take its fair share of the art if it decides to bolt from L.A.

“I guess you try to do an even-steven split,” Chick said. “And who knows how you divide who gets what?”

At the Central Library, “even-steven” is out of the question when it comes to control of its more than 16,000 rare books, some dating to the 15th century. Library spokeswoman Brenda Breaux left little doubt that L.A. expects every one of them to stay right where it is: downtown.

“If the Valley were to secede, and anybody in the Valley wanted to see one of our rare books, they’d only have to call and make an appointment,” she said. “They don’t even need a library card.”

Elsewhere in the bureaucracy, some assets seem simple to divide. A colorful map of the city’s 15 zones for graffiti-removal contracts shows a neat boundary right down Mulholland Drive.

But for every item that looks easy, many more don’t.

* The city has 37 franchise agreements with oil and gas companies to operate underground pipelines in return for millions of dollars in fees.

Shell Oil Co. runs pipes beneath Sunset Boulevard on the Westside, but also beneath Roscoe Boulevard in the Valley. What’s the fair way to split the bounty from Shell and the other companies?

* Los Angeles spent $209 million to build a network of 10,000 vehicle sensors embedded in the pavement of busy streets, enabling traffic experts in the basement of City Hall to adjust the timing of stoplights to ease congestion.

A new Valley city would presumably keep the sensors under Ventura Boulevard, but would it spend millions to build its own command center to adjust the lights? “It’s not going to be that cheap,” said Verej Janoyan, the engineer who runs the system. “It involves a lot of work to partition.”

* The city opened a state-of-the-art police training center in Granada Hills in 1998. It cost $29 million. Officers use it to practice high-speed maneuvers in squad cars and stage mock hostage situations in a fake town with a barbershop, gas station and stores.

“You can’t split it,” said Deputy Police Chief Maurice Moore. Would the LAPD keep it? Or would the new Valley city take it and charge the LAPD to use it?

Mayor Richard Riordan expects that after Valley residents take a hard look at the issues raised in the secession study, they’ll realize they’re better off sticking with Los Angeles, said Deputy Mayor Bill Violante. But Close, whose Valley VOTE group led the petition drive that prompted the study, expects it will offer a viable divorce settlement.

“It’s very common in divorces that one of the spouses is in a state of denial,” Close said. “I think that’s where we are now with L.A.”

Raoul Felder, a New York divorce lawyer who went to bat for Elizabeth Taylor’s eighth husband, Larry Fortensky, sees the design of a Los Angeles breakup settlement as a “nightmare.” He also wonders whether the secession movement could meet the same fate as the divorce plans of real-estate moguls who conclude that their sprawling empires are too complex to untangle.

“The husband,” he said, “usually takes the wife out to dinner and says: ‘Listen, we’re too rich to get divorced.’ ”