LAFCO: The Little Agency That Could Rock This Town

Whoa, getta load of that LAFCO!

Is this a gorgeous bureaucracy or what? And did you ever see so much talent packed into one little commission? I mean, this is one red-hot red-tape agency!

The trophy bureaucracy of the moment, the one everyone is courting, is the Local Agency Formation Commission, LAFCO.

There’s a LAFCO in every county in California, and there has been since 1963. Every month, usually to no audience but those who have to be there, each goes about the humdrum business of arranging water district and school district boundaries and such.

But once in a great while, it is called upon to rule whether a new city should be created. And although there are public votes and petitions required at this stage and that, no new city gets born without getting the big OK from LAFCO.

Southern California’s LAFCOs have midwifed the births of plenty of civic children of late, giving their bureaucratic blessing to new burgs like Diamond Bar and Malibu, Santa Clarita and Laguna Hills and Calabasas.

But those cities were carved from unincorporated bits and pieces of big, open counties. The reason LAFCO is such a hot number these days is that it will have to consider something massive and revolutionary: cutting new cities out of a large and living city that already exists: Los Angeles.

The San Fernando Valley is poised to jump ship from SS Los Angeles. The harbor area is making noises about doing the same. Hollywood, once an independent city, is wondering whether it wants to be one again--although presumably without the strict prohibitionist requirements of the original “dry” Hollywood.

Even the Los Angeles City Council no longer can veto whether its territorial boundaries get drawn and quartered. Out in the Valley, down in the harbor, people can get riled up, people can sign petitions, but unless LAFCO says “yes,” the signs reading “Welcome to the San Fernando Valley, the Al Gore of Cities--Its Own Man” can stay in the garage.

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I went to check out this A-list agency. On the third floor of the county administration building, just inside the double doors of the Board of Supervisors’ executive offices and to the left, there it was: Room 383.

It’s not much to look at; a staff of three and an annual budget of something less than a half-million bucks is unprepossessing, even by the standards of a decent ghost town. And the place wasn’t thronged with messengers bearing flowers and invitations. In fact it was dark and locked a couple of days before the holiday weekend officially began.

But the power behind that door! The blandishments people would lay at LAFCO’s feet to get on its good side! San Fernando Valley secessionists would promise to name whole subdivisions after commissioners’ grandchildren. Hollywood could arrange to air LAFCO meetings on cable TV and surely a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame could follow. Map makers would mutter about kickbacks from the small fortune they would make redrawing the city of Los Angeles.

The eight LAFCO commissioners and six alternates couldn’t possibly accept, of course. Most are elected officials of grand or small scale; one is a retired Muni Court judge and one is a horse doctor. The days are gone when the likes of Los Angeles City Councilman Art Snyder could manage to get an exit on the Pasadena Freeway--Via Marisol--named after his daughter.

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Shortly after California became a state, Los Angeles became a county. It soon stretched from the Tehachapis to San Juan Capistrano, and from the Pacific to the Colorado River. It was 34,520 square miles--bigger than Cambodia, bigger than Portugal.

It split up in short order. The last big schism came when Orange County broke away in 1889, fussing to the last over whether it would call itself Santa Ana or Anaheim County.

For cells, splitting is the natural order of things. For families, even civic ones, it is not always so. Secession is often likened to a divorce, but it’s more like separating Siamese twins, disentangling a single nervous system and vascular system and digestive system into two functioning entities. LAFCO must even ensure that any divvying up of L.A. is “revenue neutral”--government-speak for nobody getting stuck with the check, and nobody pocketing any profit, either.

Bookmark LAFCO in your mind’s computer bank. Its acronym sounds like the name of a comedy club, but that bland little agency in Room 383 will likely bring sobering changes to the map of Southern California.

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Columnist Patt Morrison writes today for the vacationing Al Martinez. Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.