Lessons of Secession Bid Failure

The crushing defeat of a ballot proposal for Carson schools to secede from the Los Angeles Unified School District left in its wake a debate over the influence of public employee unions in other breakaway efforts.

Was the 3-to-1 rejection in Tuesday’s election a vote of confidence in the giant school district? Or was it a testament to the determination and power of public employee unions to fight such proposals and a cautionary tale for other groups wanting to leave either the school district or the city of Los Angeles?

Los Angeles schools Supt. Roy Romer said Carson voters were willing to give his district another chance because of its recent gains in statewide testing results and other improvements. Voters in the South Bay city turned down, 74% to 26%, the proposal to carve out their own 21,500-student system from the nation’s second-largest school district.

“We have a distance to go, but we have made substantial progress,” said Romer, who sees the vote as a “very good test case” for other school secession movements in the San Fernando Valley and elsewhere.

But many political observers and activists cited the combination of a secession campaign run by political neophytes and a sophisticated anti-secession effort by United Teachers-Los Angeles, the district’s most influential employee union, which outspent the opposition 25 to 1.

Political experts across the ideological spectrum agreed that public employee unions will continue to be big players in opposing breakaway drives. Those unions, they say, fear that creating smaller cities and school districts will erode their power bases.

“We will learn by the mistakes that occurred in Carson,” said Richard Close, chairman of Valley VOTE, which seeks to split off the San Fernando Valley from the city of Los Angeles.

Close said his group has always anticipated needing a professional campaign to counter expected fierce opposition from public employee unions.

The Carson result “reinforces my belief that when the Valley cityhood issue goes on the ballot, we’re going to have to be well-organized, well-funded and have professional consultants that know how to run campaigns,” Close said. “It cannot be run by grass-roots people who are not professionals.”

Democratic political consultant Joseph Cerrell said public employee unions “will absolutely play a key role in any future secession elections. They will want to keep the status quo.”

Republican political strategist Arnold Steinberg said that what happened in Carson “is not unusual. . . . Unions see these movements as threats to their power, and they see [pouring money and volunteers] into defeating these measures as a good investment.”

The Yes on Measure D side, a small group of Carson residents who worked eight years to get the secession proposal on the ballot, had less than $5,000 and no political professional to guide them. UTLA poured more than $125,000 into the contest and used a professional consultant, political mailers and scores of teacher volunteers--many of them longtime Carson residents--to walk precincts and work telephone banks. Perhaps most important, they enlisted their students’ parents in the cause, raising fears of overcrowded schools, the departure of most teachers and higher property taxes if the new district were formed.

As the first ballot test of secession fever in more than 50 years, the Carson vote was closely monitored by several of the separate movements underway.

Carolyn Harris, a leader in the Carson effort and the top vote-getter among the 18 candidates for what would have been its new school board, said she has no regrets about how the campaign was run.

“I’m disappointed, but I feel we did everything we could in a grass-roots campaign, which is what we wanted,” Harris said Wednesday. “But I feel we accomplished something by bringing the [schools] issue to the community’s attention.”

She also blasted the teachers union as a “cartel of outsiders.” Harris said she probably would help out with future secession drives but would not take a leadership role or seek office again.

“I want to spend time now with my family and my 10 grandchildren,” Harris said.

Valley Leaders Say Drive Is Unaffected

But another organizer, Gloria Estrada, said she was ready to try again.

“How soon can we start signing people up again?” Estrada asked supporters gathered Tuesday night at the Carson Hilton Hotel.

A leader of the movement to form two Valley school districts from Los Angeles Unified asserted that the Carson experience has no bearing on her movement’s chances.

“We’re sad for them, but ours is a different issue,” said Stephanie Carter of Finally Restoring Excellence in Education, which advocates formation of two 100,000-student districts.

“Every case is individual, and we’re focused on what we need to do,” Carter said. FREE is preparing for its Dec. 6 hearing before the State Board of Education, which has final say over whether a district formation measure can be submitted to voters. (When it appeared before the state board, Carson had secured the support of the Los Angeles County Committee on School District Organization, but the committee has recommended against the Valley proposal.)

Carter did, however, take the teachers union to task for its role in the Carson election, saying it distorted facts and used students as pawns in a campaign of scare tactics.

“It’s disheartening to watch the opposition use children the way they did. These are precisely the people that you don’t want teaching students,” Carter said.

UTLA President Day Higuchi and other union officials strongly defended their campaign, saying it was based on the study conducted for county and state education officials. The outcome, they said, reflected voters’ satisfaction with their schools and an unwillingness to take a chance on a new system.

“We could afford to do it,” Higuchi said of the campaign, “and I think we performed a valuable public service” in getting information to voters.

Several school district secession movements are in early stages--gathering signatures from registered voters in the proposed new districts. Besides the ones in the San Fernando Valley, they include efforts in the city’s southern quarter.

Andrew Mardesich of San Pedro said Wednesday that he plans to reactivate a signature-gathering campaign after the first of the year for a school independence movement for all of Los Angeles Unified’s District K--Gardena, Lomita, Harbor City, San Pedro and Wilmington, as well as Carson. Organizers had suspended their drive until the separate Carson proposal was resolved to avoid confusing people, said Mardesich, who is leading a separate drive for a new city in the Los Angeles Harbor area.

Mardesich, who supported the Carson district proposal, said it failed in part because organizers focused more on who would be on the new five-member school board (three of them were among the 18 candidates) than on promoting the district itself.

And they also underestimated the campaigning skills and resources of the teachers union, he said.

The Carson proposal drew the most attention among the two dozen measures on local ballots in Los Angeles County on Tuesday. But another widely watched issue was an advisory measure on whether to close the Hawthorne Municipal Airport and use the land to build shops, restaurants and a hotel.

Would-be developers financed a campaign supporting the advisory measure, claiming it would help revitalize the city’s sagging Eastside and bring more tax dollars for police and neighborhood improvements.

But the measure was opposed by pilots and by state and national aviation associations, who joined some of the city’s longtime leaders in decisively defeating it, 71% to 29%.

Voters also elected two pro-airport candidates to the City Council--Gary Parsons and Pablo Catano--while ousting incumbent Steve Andersen, who had moved to put the airport measure on the ballot in the first place.

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Times staff writer Manuel Gamiz Jr. contributed to this report.