Secessionists Concentrate on Getting Message Out

After years of battling Los Angeles’ power elite, political activists pushing secession in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood and the Harbor area have opened aggressive campaigns for the hearts and minds of their neighbors.

In the Valley, the political cradle of the movement that now extends to schools and public transit, breakup backers have scheduled six public forums to coincide with the release in March of a study of whether city services match taxes in the breakaway areas.

In Hollywood, activists have begun canvassing door-to-door, delivering their message that residents would be better off running their own city. Block groups have been mobilized in support of the breakaway effort.

“We want to empower people, let them know the facts, get them involved, let them know they have a voice,” said Fares Wehbe, president of Hollywood VOTE. “At the end of the day, when they vote on cityhood, we want them to be able to make an informed decision.”

And within the Harbor district, secessionists are circulating a video to service clubs and civic organizations, which will debut soon on cable television.

“It talks about the problems, and why we need to leave Los Angeles,” said Andrew Mardesich, a leader of the Harbor group.

Those opposed to municipal divorce are getting their message out as well.

The evidence is in the windows of businesses up and down Pacific Avenue in San Pedro.

Storefront signs from the city’s new Department of Neighborhood Empowerment--created by the new City Charter, proposed as a partial answer to some of the issues that prompted the secession movement--tell of coming advisory neighborhood councils throughout Los Angeles, created to improve residents’ involvement in government.

“Your Voice, Your Neighborhood, Your City” the posters proclaim.

Mayor Richard Riordan, the peripatetic and popular chief executive who fervently opposes secession, has appeared in the Valley and the Harbor area in recent weeks to hammer home his arguments.

“It’s bad for the city,” Riordan said in an interview. “It’s morally wrong. It’s wrong to abandon the poor.”

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The escalation of the debate comes at a time of financial pinch for the secession proponents. All three movements are strapped for money. Hollywood VOTE has about $5,000 in the bank, while Valley VOTE received just $20,454 in income in 1999, less than one-tenth of what it brought in the year before. The salary of the group’s president was slashed.

Although Valley activists insist that wealthy contributors are ready to help, the group expects once again to rely heavily on volunteers to get its message out.

So far, Valley VOTE has expanded its core of true believers to create a volunteer corps of more than 200 people.

Agitators for cityhood in the Valley, Hollywood and Harbor areas shocked the downtown political establishment during the last two years as each, in turn, filed to break away from the city.

There has been nothing like it at the grass-roots level since Proposition 13 more than 20 years ago, many veteran political observers said. Then, government changed radically as voters slashed taxes; today, in a political coda, secessionists demand better value in the services their taxes buy.

The path to breakup runs through an unprecedented examination of government in Los Angeles now underway, and could climax in November 2002 with a vote in which 3.8 million residents will have the chance to decide whether to carve the nation’s second-largest city into as many as four smaller ones.

In the meantime, the city faces a period of intense introspection that few other government jurisdictions have undergone.

“This has never been done before, at least not on this scale,” said Larry Calemine, executive director of the Local Agency Formation Commission, known as LAFCO, which is overseeing the studies. “At least not since the Civil War.”

“It’s historic,” agreed Paula Boland, one of the original Valley secession leaders. “People said it could never be done, that we would never get to this point. It has turned the whole city on its ears.”

Even though a possible vote on cityhood is not likely to happen for almost two years, secessionists say they need to begin now to make their case to voters.

“Every street we reach, we try to organize them so we have a block captain and a network of support,” Wehbe said. “That way we will have an organization that can mobilize overnight.”

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In Chatsworth, Laura Digilio spends as much as 15 hours a week away from her sales and marketing business organizing for Valley VOTE.

“Being a homeowner and a registered voter, I think it’s a good idea to have a study to see where our tax dollars go,” Digilio said. “My street, my trees and my community are not being taken care of.”

Digilio said she is not a secessionist. At this point, she supports only the study, and will support cityhood only if the study shows it is feasible and will not hurt the rest of Los Angeles.

Secessionists believe that there is strong support for breaking up Los Angeles if the studies show the breakup would be viable. They cite their ability to get 25% of the voters in each proposed new city to sign petitions triggering cityhood studies.

Simultaneous votes on Valley, Harbor and Hollywood cityhood, secessionists have predicted, would boost chances for passage of all three.

A Los Angeles Times poll in 1999 found that 60% of Valley voters and 47% of voters citywide supported Valley cityhood. Cityhood would require approval of a majority of the voters in the breakaway area and a majority of voters citywide.

The secessionist campaign is striking a responsive chord in the breakaway areas, according to recent interviews. At cafes along Ventura Boulevard, and at gathering places and watering holes in Hollywood and San Pedro, many said they see some potential advantage in having a smaller city in control of its services. But many also said they have questions about how it would affect their pocketbooks.

In all three areas, most residents approached were positive about the idea of independence but hazy about specific cityhood proposals and wary of the fine details.

John Wigmanich moved to Sherman Oaks from Santa Barbara. He said the Valley does not compare favorably with his former home.

“It’s night and day,” he said on the sidewalk outside Noah’s New York Bagels.

Graffiti, potholes and other signs of blight are too prevalent in the Valley, Wigmanich and others said.

A Valley city, he said, “is a good idea, I’d like to see the Valley spruced up. Having its own city would give the Valley more control of things.”

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Arturo Suarez agreed that his Hollywood neighborhood might be better able to solve its problems if Hollywood became its own city, but he said he had many questions about how the change would affect Hollywood residents financially,

“You’ve got to know how much it’s going to cost,” he said.

Secessionists are counting on the pending financial studies to confirm what they have said all along, that the breakaway areas are not getting services equal to what they send downtown in taxes.

LAFCO has received $2.65 million in state, county and city funding to hire consultants and attorneys to conduct the financial secession studies.

A draft, scheduled to be released in March--very close to the city’s municipal election April 10--will provide an assessment of what the fiscal impact of a breakup would be on the city and of whether the new cities would be financially viable, at least for the first three years of operation. Revisions would follow, leading to the ultimate determination by the LAFCO board: whether tax revenues produced by the Valley are “substantially equal” to spending on services.

Those studies will show that cityhood would cost Valley residents more in taxes and diminish the quality of government services, Riordan predicted in an interview.

“If they secede, they will have to re-create our infrastructure. Taxes will be higher. They won’t have the Department of Water and Power,” Riordan said. “The Valley is doing extremely well under the banner of the city of Los Angeles.”

Others likely to join a campaign against secession, should it reach the ballot, include leaders of the downtown business establishment, a majority of the City Council and representatives of powerful city employee unions, all of which have the ability to bankroll a major effort to kill secession, observers said.

Political deconstruction would reverse the consolidation that created the city as we know it in the early years of the last century, said historian Kevin Starr, the state librarian.

The Harbor area was annexed by Los Angeles in 1909, after Los Angeles city fathers promised voters in San Pedro and Wilmington better services.

Hollywood was annexed in 1913, and the Valley in 1915, after those communities decided their independence was not as important as access to the water that Los Angeles had tapped from the Owens Valley.

“He who had the water had the power,” said Gene La Pietra, founder and chairman of Hollywood VOTE. “The city of Los Angeles refused to sell water to Hollywood unless it was annexed. Hollywood had no choice.”

Venice and Watts followed suit.

“Los Angeles was pieced together with large increments coming in over time,” Starr said. “Now people are deciding whether to take it apart by pieces.”

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The common thread that runs through secessionists’ rhetoric in the Valley, Harbor area and Hollywood is the feeling that Los Angeles City Hall is too distant, both geographically and politically, and that it has failed to provide services that match what residents pay in taxes.

Cityhood movement leaders have their own stories about the moments that made them decide they had to leave Los Angeles, at least politically.

For La Pietra, who owns two Hollywood dance clubs, the epiphany came just before Christmas two years ago, when friends visiting from out of town wanted to go shopping.

“Rather than go down to Hollywood Boulevard to get in the Christmas spirit, we went to Brand Boulevard in Glendale,” recalled La Pietra. “I thought, ‘This is so embarrassing,’ but the state of Hollywood Boulevard was so deplorable.”

Indeed, the examples of adjacent Glendale, Burbank and San Fernando provide some of the best ammunition for secessionists as they launch their new campaigns, said Valley VOTE chairman Richard Close. Such cities serve as constant reminders to Valley residents of how much better services can be in cities that are smaller and more manageable than Los Angeles.

“People in the Valley see what good government can do,” Close said. “They wonder why police response times are half as long in [the neighboring city of] San Fernando. Why are the streets smooth in Burbank, but when you go into North Hollywood you suddenly hit potholes?”

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But, some doubters see the secessionists as facing an uphill battle.

No amount of public outreach by secessionists will convince voters to make such a dramatic change, said Eugene Grigsby, UCLA professor of urban planning and director of the school’s Advanced Policy Institute.

“I predict it is not very likely to happen, when the financial feasibility studies come out and people realize how much they are going to have to pay for it,” Grigsby said.