Santa Clarita May Offer a Model for Secession

Nowhere in the country is there a precedent for San Fernando Valley secession. Los Angeles would be the first major American city to slice itself in two.

Where, then, can architects of the proposed Valley city turn for a model?

Across the Santa Susana Mountains in the 14-year-old city of Santa Clarita.

It’s by no means a perfect model. The San Fernando Valley, home to 1.4 million people, has nine times the population. But Santa Clarita offers the closest thing there is to a road map for the Valley to bolt Los Angeles.

“You’ve got bigger numbers, bigger dollars, and more folks involved, and it makes it a lot more complex,” said George A. Caravalho, the Santa Clarita city manager. “The thing is, if you approach it in a systematic way, it certainly can be done.”

Jo Anne Darcy, a leader of the Santa Clarita cityhood drive, agrees, but finds the sheer scale of it daunting nonetheless.

“It would be a mess,” she warned.

Overall, Santa Clarita officials said the Valley has much to gain from more local control. They said their own mayor and council quickly passed laws to curb billboards and stop builders from chopping down oak trees.

But Los Angeles officials cast Valley secession as a vastly more complicated endeavor than Santa Clarita cityhood. To them, secession is fraught with risk of fiscal doom for the remaining city of 2.3 million residents on the south side of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Santa Clarita voters approved cityhood in 1987 in an effort to control growth in the unincorporated areas of Saugus, Valencia, Newhall and Canyon Country on the northern edge of Los Angeles County.

Since then, Santa Clarita has charted a course nearly identical to what secession planners envision for a Valley city.

At first, Santa Clarita depended on the county to continue providing all municipal services under contract--just as the Valley would rely on the city of Los Angeles.

But year by year, Santa Clarita has built its own city agencies, one by one. The city maintains its own parks and streets. It runs its own finance, personnel and planning departments. It hires private contractors to collect trash and inspect buildings. Its only remaining contracts with the county are for police and fire protection, and animal and flood control.

Valley cityhood would unfold in much the same way under a plan under review by the Local Agency Formation Commission. The commission could put the proposal before voters in November.

The Valley city would start off wholly dependent on the city of Los Angeles to provide services under contract for $1 billion a year. It would employ just 19 people to run a “contract city” with a population larger than Boston and San Francisco combined.

But gradually, the Valley council--like Santa Clarita’s--could build its own government from scratch, hiring thousands of employees or private vendors to repave streets, fix traffic signals or fight fires.

“Contracting for services is a temporary process,” said Richard Close, chairman of the Valley VOTE secession group. “It’s an opportunity to allow the elected city council to make the permanent decisions.”

But it’s clear the Valley’s steps toward autonomy would be far more difficult than Santa Clarita’s.

Santa Clarita’s independence was little more than a blip for the rest of the county, while the Valley’s departure from Los Angeles would have a profound effect on what remains of the city.

Santa Clarita’s population of 151,000 is less than 2% of the county’s 9.5 million. Its $132-million budget this year is less than 1% of the county’s $16-billion budget. Santa Clarita employs 323 people; the county more than 88,000.

In the end, what was the effect of Santa Clarita cityhood on the county?

“Nothing,” said Ken Pulskamp, Santa Clarita’s assistant city manager. “When you’re talking about eight or 10 maintenance workers, and they can be moved around the county, it’s not that big of a deal.”

By contrast, the Valley’s population is 37% of the city of Los Angeles. Loss of the Valley’s 222 square miles of land would cost the city almost half its territory. The Valley produces nearly a third of the city’s tax revenue. Roughly 8,600 of the city’s 35,000 employees provide services to the Valley.

So, despite safeguards in state secession law for city workers, Los Angeles officials fear Valley independence could lead to layoffs and service cuts.

Ron Deaton, the City Council’s point man on secession, has raised those concerns in negotiations on terms of the ballot measure. He has dismissed aspects of the “contract-city” plan as “Never-Never Land” and described secessionists as “out to lunch.”

Larry J. Calemine, the official in charge of drafting the ballot measure, warned that a Valley mayor and council could “adopt all kinds of things that throw everything helter-skelter,” no matter what voters might approve.

“We have to be concerned about keeping the city of L.A. whole,” Calemine said.

Beyond its obligations to Los Angeles, a Valley city would face other hurdles unfamiliar to Santa Clarita.

Year after year in Santa Clarita, home and shopping mall construction expands the city tax rolls; that’s no longer possible in the Valley. Also, Santa Clarita--as a city born from an unincorporated area--was able to tap new sources of state aid available only to cities; the Valley--as part of Los Angeles--has relied on those funds for years.

Finally, the Valley, unlike Santa Clarita, would have to pay “alimony” to the remaining city of Los Angeles as compensation for lost tax revenue. So even if City Hall has shortchanged the Valley for years, as separatists charge, state law effectively bars the use of secession to correct the imbalance.