Hollywood Secession Campaign Survives Brief Scare

After briefly throwing a scare into the Hollywood cityhood campaign, Los Angeles County officials acknowledged Thursday that they goofed in advising secessionist leaders this week that they were far short on petition signatures.

Incorporation backers filed petitions last month calling for a cityhood feasibility study that they say were signed by the required 25% of the almost 80,000 registered voters living within the proposed city boundaries.

But the county registrar-recorder’s office informed the cityhood group that there are actually 85,325 voters there.

So, instead of the 19,600 signatures that secessionist leaders had calculated they needed, the petitions needed 21,331 valid signatures by county officials’ original calculations. And a random sampling done as part of the petition verification process indicated that the petitions would come up far short of that number.

Leaders of Hollywood Voters Organized Toward Empowerment--or Hollywood VOTE--were puzzled by the discrepancy.

Gene La Pietra, the group’s founder, speculated that the registrar-recorder’s office might not realize that the proposed city boundaries split up several election polling place precincts, leaving some precincts’ registered voters outside of the proposed city limits.

Or maybe county officials had mistakenly added in the 5,500 people that cityhood petition gatherers registered as voters during the recent campaign. In calculating the total number of valid signatures needed, officials were supposed to use the number of voters on county rolls at the start of the petition drive, not the end of it, La Pietra asserted.

In any event, the law gives secessionists an extra two weeks to gather more signatures if they come up short after all petition names are verified by the county, La Pietra said. So the Hollywood independence campaign is not in jeopardy.

Political consultant Angelo Paparella, whose El Segundo company, Progressive Campaigns Inc., helped with the petitions and checked over signatures before the petitions were turned in, agreed.

Paparella’s staff verified 21,200 of the 38,003 signatures on the petitions before stopping.

“It’s very confusing,” Paparella said Thursday of the split precincts.

Reached in midafternoon Thursday, Registrar-Recorder Conny McCormack was confident the county’s calculations were correct. She said voter registration computers are programmed to deduct precinct voters living outside Hollywood’s boundaries.

“We certified 85,325 voters. They say it’s closer to 79,000. We determined our number was accurate. We sent reams of documentation to them yesterday,” McCormack said.

But an hour later Thursday, McCormack announced that a mistake had been made.

She had asked county lawyers about the voter certification dispute and they agreed with the Hollywood secessionists’ calculation of the number of signatures needed.

“I’m eating a lot of crow,” McCormack said.