New Valley City Would Depend on Some L.A. Services, Study Finds

A new San Fernando Valley city carved out of Los Angeles could sustain itself on taxes generated north of Mulholland Drive, but would depend on the rest of Los Angeles to furnish far more services than Valley separatists have long hoped.

City officials and secession advocates agree that conclusion will be the central finding of a major study on Valley cityhood to be released on Wednesday.

It will be a crucial juncture in the debate over Valley independence. A municipal breakup proposal cannot go before voters next year unless the study finds the Valley can support itself, and it also requires political backing on both sides of the Hollywood Hills. To prevail, secession advocates must win majority support from the proposed Valley city and from Los Angeles as a whole.

Critics of the idea have long maintained that it is neither financially nor politically viable. City representatives have stated that Los Angeles’ sewer, water, power, computer and communications systems are too complex or costly to divide.

City officials expect the study to conclude that a Valley city is feasible only if it contracts with Los Angeles to provide those and possibly other basic services. That would preserve those services for Valley residents but would deny them the independence from Los Angeles that secession is intended to achieve.

The study by the Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, will also cite areas of potential harm that the Valley’s departure could inflict on services in what would remain of Los Angeles.

Commission officials declined to name them, but documents produced by City Hall for the study suggest at least one possible downside to secession: a sharp drop in funding for the L.A. Department of Transportation’s DASH bus routes downtown, on the Westside and in other neighborhoods outside the Valley.

The city gets $20 million in DASH funding, based on its population, which would plunge by 1.3 million people if the Valley seceded. Los Angeles spends more than 90% of its DASH money on routes south of the Santa Monica Mountains.

It’s a dramatic illustration of what separatists see as downtown’s history of shortchanging the Valley out of its fair share of services. City officials deny the claim, but even they expect the study to confirm that the Valley pays more taxes to the city than it gets back in services, in part because other parts of Los Angeles are poorer and therefore have less to contribute to the city’s tax base.

If so, the report will suggest payments from the new city to what’s left of the old one to keep tax money flowing south over the mountains. Under state law, the Valley cannot secede unless it leaves Los Angeles whole.

The study will offer, for the first time, a detailed picture of how the new landlocked city of 222 square miles could run itself on a budget likely to exceed $1 billion a year. It will lay out a Valley budget covering the transition to cityhood and at least three years of full operation. It will also estimate how much start-up money the city would receive from the state under a law that gives new cities extra aid during their first seven years of autonomy. The new city would be bigger than San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Phoenix, Dallas or Detroit. More people would live in the Valley city--as yet unnamed--than in 13 states: New Mexico, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Hawaii, Alaska, Delaware, South Dakota and North Dakota.

As Los Angeles City Hall has produced its reams of data for the study, champions of Valley secession have come to recognize the magnitude of the challenges faced by a new city.

Last year, they called for a wholesale split of every city agency. For a few cases, they offered joint management with Los Angeles, but suggested a pro rata split after three years if the two sides couldn’t reach agreement on sharing control.

Secessionists May Revise Plan

But now they say they might revise their plan, proposing extensive service contracts with the very Los Angeles bureaucracy they seek to escape. By taking that approach, they risk undermining their cause by inviting the question: If forming a new city merely means contracting for some of the same services from the old one, then what’s the point?

The answer, in part, is that advocates see political benefits to a gradual breakup rather than a sharp one.

By relying on Los Angeles--at least at first--for basic services, the new Valley city would gain stability. Politically, that might enhance the prospects for secession by reassuring voters who would otherwise be wary of signing off on the unprecedented dismantling of a major American city.

“You have to make a smooth, seamless transition so the people in the community don’t see any negative impacts,” said Daniel T. Miller, a financial consultant to Valley secessionists. “It’s real hard to all of a sudden just set up a new operation.”

The study by LAFCO, the commission that redraws local government boundaries in Los Angeles County, was triggered by a petition signed in 1998 by more than 200,000 Valley voters.

Over the spring and summer, LAFCO consultants will rework it to produce a final study that will enable the nine-member commission to decide whether to put secession on the November 2002 ballot. The consultants are drafting a separate study on proposed cityhood for the harbor area, but a shortage of money has delayed a third study, one on Hollywood secession.

LAFCO Executive Officer Larry J. Calemine declined to comment on the Valley study.

But the city records on which it is based offer a clear picture of why officials expect it to say the Valley must contract with Los Angeles for basic services.

Among the most staggering tasks would be the untangling of the city’s vast computer and communications systems.

Think of any city function, and chances are that Los Angeles has a uniquely designed computer program to track it: dog licenses, arson cases, elevator inspections, pension checks, construction permits and police evidence logs, to name a few.

At last count, the city was using 1,788 programs, many of them under license agreements with software vendors that prohibit making copies for, say, a new Valley city.

Much of the system is run through a mainframe computer downtown. It’s linked together by a network of fiber-optic cables that stretch from Sylmar to San Pedro, East L.A. to Woodland Hills. The cables could be dug up and reconfigured to wall off the Valley and its new mainframe from the rest of Los Angeles, “but you’re talking about a major construction project,” said Paul Janis, assistant general manager at the Information Technology Agency.

The system also includes dozens of transmitters and receivers scattered around the region to link the thousands of radios and wireless data terminals that police officers and firefighters use in the field.

Most important, the Los Angeles Police Department said the loss of an elaborate emergency dispatch center that it is building in the West Valley under its $235-million upgrade of the 911 system would “severely compromise” the ability to respond quickly to calls.

City officials said it would take a major engineering study just to figure out how many millions of dollars it would cost to divide or duplicate the computer and communications networks.

New Sewage Plant Not Recommended

The sewer system also poses daunting problems. Much of the Valley’s sewage is treated at the Hyperion Treatment Plant near Los Angeles International Airport. Judy Wilson, director of the city Bureau of Sanitation, said the Valley could build its own plant, but it “would be far from economical,” requiring a huge capital investment to treat the same amount of sewage.

“A better approach would be for the Valley to continue to use the Hyperion capacity by contract,” she wrote in a memo.

Splitting up the Department of Water and Power is a headache that even secession advocates have said they prefer to avoid.

“It looks like it’s in everybody’s interest to maintain a close relationship on water and power,” said Richard Katz, an executive board member of the Valley VOTE secession group.

Once the proposal is released, the group will have 45 days to decide which agencies the new city can run on its own and which it would like Los Angeles to continue to run.

“You want to assure the voter that if you approve secession Tuesday, on Wednesday there would still be cops and paramedics in place,” Katz said.