Valley Looks to Others for Examples

Examining other municipal governments as far away as London, more than 100 business and community leaders met Monday to discuss how to bring governing power to the local level in the San Fernando Valley.

With the secession movement as an understated backdrop, more than a dozen national and international urban policy experts spoke of lessons learned from London’s borough system, municipal merger mania in Canada and the privately funded neighborhood associations that are sprouting up around the nation.

The daylong seminar at the Sheraton Universal Hotel was sponsored by the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley.

Calling Los Angeles’ nearly 4 million residents “victims of City Hall,” David Fleming, chairman of the alliance and a supporter of the study that could lead to Valley cityhood, called for “breaking down L.A’s city government into smaller, more localized units, such as boroughs.”

Only that way, Fleming said, “can the breaking up of Los Angeles be avoided.”

“This is not an issue of secession,” added Bruce Ackerman, president of the alliance. “It’s about ‘Can we hold the city of Los Angeles together and still take some control back to the local government?’ It’s an issue of empowerment and engagement more than anything else.”

With speakers like researcher Joel Kotkin singing the praises of “small, cohesive cities,” such as Burbank, the recurring theme was that smaller is better. Absent from the panel was anyone extolling the virtues--political or otherwise--of big city government.

“Bring government to the local level,” said Kotkin, a research fellow in urban studies at the Reason Public Policy Institute, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit research group.

“With governance done by people who are local, the prospects for places like the San Fernando Valley are good,” Kotkin said.

Giving ammunition to proponents of downsizing was a study of the delivery of municipal services in some of the largest communities in the nation. The study, done for the Reason Institute, compared factors such as the size of a community’s police force with the FBI’s crime index for the area. The study found that in 1996, the most recent year for which statistics were available, only 11% of the cities surveyed delivered police services with a maximum of efficiency at a minimum cost. And those communities, according to researcher James Nolan, tended to be the smaller ones on the list.

By comparison, all of the sample cities delivered cost-efficient parks services, Nolan said.

“It’s not just an issue of size of government,” Ackerman said. “It’s an issue of who’s best equipped to provide what services at what level.”

While most of the speakers agreed on the overall goal of local empowerment, there were various theories on how it can be achieved.

Robert Nelson, a professor in the school of public affairs at the University of Maryland, noted the “explosive” growth of privately funded neighborhood associations, such as those that govern certain aspects of life in gated communities and condominium complexes.

Such associations, which Nelson said include 42 million Americans, can efficiently arrange for trash pickup, security services and even street cleaning, he said. But he acknowledged that such solutions are harder to apply broadly because the groups are funded by fees paid by property owners. Lower income areas, while expert at community organizing, might not have the wherewithal to create such associations.

The neighborhood associations described by the speakers were a step beyond the more than 100 neighborhood advisory councils that are being created in Los Angeles under charter reform.

In the past, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has called the advisory councils “a tremendous milestone in our journey toward a more responsive city government.”

Monday, Fleming labeled them “no more than placebos . . . the political equivalent of smoke and mirrors.”

To be meaningful, said speaker Ronald J. Oakerson, “neighborhood councils must have some real authority . . . taxing and regulatory.” Such authority is crucial, said Oakerson, a professor at Houghton College in New York, “if you really want people to take responsibility for their neighborhoods.”