City Isn’t the Only Side With Secession Secrets
It was bound to get ugly one of these days, and now it has.
The little county cabal that will play Solomon and decide whether to go ahead and slice up L.A. into civic pieces is griping that the big mean old city of Los Angeles is stalling and stonewalling and maybe even hiding the goods--that when it comes to counting the San Fernando Valley’s share of the city kitty, City Hall is acting like a vengeful hubby, stashing marital assets where the divorce court can’t find them.
Excuse me, boys, but I was in line at the complaint window first. You’ll have to wait your turn.
For more than a month now, I’ve been trying to see with my own peepers the evidence of secession fever--the petitions. Some 205,000 Valley folk signed. So did 45,294 from Hollywood, who want their own city. So did another 3,500 from Hollywood who want to cleave to L.A. and not be cleaved from it.
I wanted to rummage through these pages of scrawls. Who was signing? Were the names and addresses random, as if collected from people sauntering through the Van Nuys Air Show? Or were there whole streets’ worth of names, suggesting door-to-door signature-collecting on sidewalks that even Avon doesn’t walk any more? Was this secession tsunami as ethnically diverse as its leaders claim? And who among the Valley haut monde had signed on? Bob Hope? Jon Lovitz?
I called LAFCO, the Local Agency Formation Commission, which is mediating the breakup matters. It said it had passed along the petitions, and referred me to the county registrar/recorder, which referred me to the county’s lawyers. The lawyers said no. They said the petitions aren’t public record.
Well, knock me over with a quill pen.
Petitions are about as public as a document can get. The fellows who signed the Declaration of Independence certainly thought so, pledging their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to the cause. (The Valley crowd scores two out of three: They raised the secesh clamor but wouldn’t sign the formal documents for a secession study because they were scared of being sued.)
On top of that, county supervisors OKd spending tax money to verify that the names were all legit. I figure I paid for at least one page of those petitions.
So I sent over a legally phrased letter arguing yes, they are. They sent me back the same, citing state law that “initiative, referendum and recall petitions” are not public. I said this isn’t an initiative, referendum or recall. They said, “Is so.” I said “Is not.”
And there we left it--petitions for the most monumental civic event since the Portola expedition, sealed up tighter than Al Capone’s safe.
The dumbfounding part is that the county lawyers told me that, until the signatures are verified as legitimate--which happened on the Ides of March in 1999--they are public. Only afterward do they get sealed up, proving that at least in a bureaucracy, you can un-ring a bell. (To my knowledge, the law doesn’t yet require that the eyes of those who have seen the suddenly secret petitions be seared with hot pokers.)
This secession process is already secretive enough. Unlike initiatives and recalls--which have to play show-and-tell with their donors and lobbyists--the people who give money to the Secesh Cause, and the folks they give it to, don’t have to tell the rest of us diddly-squat about who they are or how they spend their money.
About three weeks ago, a LAFCO hearing on whether those people should be forced to show their hand and their bank statements took testimony from a city ethics official--and then booted her out of the hearing, along with any Joe Citizen who also happened to be in the room!
Five years ago, President Clinton ordered the feds to declassify tens of millions of secret documents, a lot of them stamped “classified” just to make an impression on the recipient. If the CIA can bear to pry its fingers from thousands of pages of paper about what it knew and did in Chile and Iran in the name of America, surely LAFCO can.
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So this appeal is to all quarter-million of you who patriotically signed those petitions . . . you Valleyans and Hollywoodsters whose hearts beat high and proud when you behold the treasures of your native soil, those designated historic and cultural landmarks like the venerable Chase Knolls Garden Apartments, that real estate development souvenir known as the Hollywood Sign and Sherman Oaks’ unforgettable 22-foot-high tower of wooden beer pallets.
To you I say, show LAFCO your mettle. Let them know you aren’t ashamed to be known and named. Go ahead and call. The number is (213) 974-1448. And tell them John Hancock sent you.
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Patt Morrison’s column appears Fridays. Her e-mail is patt.morrison@latimes.com.
