Secession Report Called ‘Full of Unknowns’

The new report laying out a complex plan to sever the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles skirted many of the toughest challenges the city will face if it splits apart, city officials said Thursday.

The report offered little guidance, for instance, on how to choose which city workers would shift to the new Valley city’s payroll, they said.

It also cites unnamed “technical problems” to be solved in order to split thousands of city assets, from garbage trucks and gardening tools to police stations and libraries. City officials say the “technical problems” are immense and could consume much of the work force for months, if not years.

“There are some things that this report just did not address, and they are big things,” said Lisa Gritzner, an aide to City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who chairs the committee on secession drives.

But supporters of Valley cityhood dismissed the concerns of city officials as overblown.

“The city bureaucrats will find 100 reasons why they don’t want their empire broken down,” said Richard Close, the chairman of the Valley VOTE secession group.

The report released Wednesday by the Local Agency Formation Commission for Los Angeles County found that a Valley city could sustain itself on tax revenue generated north of the Santa Monica Mountains.

But the Valley would have to pay the rest of Los Angeles $68 million a year in “alimony” to the shrunken city, the report concluded.

Leaders of unions that represent the city work force raised concerns Thursday on the absence of details in the report on how to choose the nearly 8,600 employees who would go to work for the Valley city.

Mike McOsker, vice president of United Firefighters of Los Angeles City, Local 112, said many firefighters were wary of switching to the new Valley city’s Fire Department. A key concern, he said, is that cost cutting by the new city “will come out of the hide of the people who work” for it.

“We’re not interested in having our bargaining unit cut in half,” he said. Thousands of custodians, building inspectors and other city employees live in the Valley and would presumably not mind working for the new city. Others, however, could face troubles with child care issues or longer commutes to work if transferred to the Valley city, she said.

“Do you flip a coin? Do you start with all the people whose first names start with J?” said Julie Butcher, general manager of Service Employees International Union, Local 347, the largest union of city workers.

Ellen Sandt, the financial analyst who supervises secession issues for the Office of Research and Administrative Services, said a top concern at City Hall is the report’s lack of detail on potential harm to Los Angeles.

It cites potential “diseconomies of scale” for both the old and new cities, and it mentions the loss of productivity for city workers assigned to oversee the transition.

“It’s going to be absolutely tremendous during the transition period, especially if you’ve got to do it in eight months,” she said.

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The study suggested the Valley city would be incorporated the day after a November 2002 vote on secession if a breakup is approved by voters both citywide and in the Valley. For eight months, the Valley city would function as a bare-bones administration preparing to launch operations as a full-blown city government in July 2003.

Scores of City Hall officials were poring over the report Thursday searching for potential problems.

Los Angeles must maintain a certain number of police officers in return for federal law enforcement grants. Some city officials, Sandt said, would need to negotiate a deal with federal authorities to keep the money flowing to a smaller LAPD. It’s one of thousands of such tasks, she said.

Already, city officials tracking their work hours have logged about $500,000 worth of time simply gathering the data for the study, she said.

“That’s a half-million dollars that could have been spent on providing services to people,” she said.

To secession advocates, the reaction of city officials and union leaders to the report amounts to mere excuses for blocking Valley residents and businesses from gaining local control over city services.

A detailed plan for splitting up the work force, Close said, is “a mechanical function” that LAFCO will address before it decides to put secession on the ballot.

“It happens every day in corporate reorganizations,” he said. “In the private sector, it’s a very normal process.”

If anything, he said, dividing the Los Angeles work force would be easier than spinning off pieces of a private company, which can force employees to move from state to state.

He also said city officials were exaggerating the potential loss of productivity.

“It’s typical city bureaucracy,” he said. “Everything’s a problem to them. They have, what, 38,000 employees? These are details that will be handled without serious problems.”

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Other issues that arose Thursday as potentially major challenges in dividing Los Angeles were the city’s near $10 billion in debt, and the report’s warning that the City Charter would need to be changed.

Eric Hoffmann, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, said splitting the debt would be “tricky” and could face a legal challenge from bondholders.

“This is uncharted territory,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had an issue with it.”

But he left open the possibility that a legal method could be found.

“We believe that this is the sort of thing that can be manageable, but we need to see the details,” he said.

Without specifying how, the report stated that the City Charter would need to be changed. It also said nothing about the consequences of voters refusing to change the charter for a city that would have lost 48% of its land and 36% of its population.

“That’s going to be a hugely sensitive issue,” said Raphael Sonenshein, who was executive director of the Appointed Charter Reform Commission.

“This report is full of unknowns.”