Vote First, Sue Later

The latest study on San Fernando Valley secession says more about the difficulty of breaking up the nation’s second-largest city than it does about what the new and old cities would be like.

A private consulting firm prepared the study for the Local Agency Formation Commission, the quasi-governmental body that will decide whether secession is put to a vote. The proposal calls for a new Valley city with a mayor, 14 city council members and--this is the surprise--just 19 employees. The old Los Angeles would continue to provide police protection, trash pickup, water, power and all other municipal services under a $1-billion-a-year contract, sidestepping the complex issue of dividing city employees and assets.

It’s hard to see the plan as anything but a fantasy for termed-out politicians: 15 new seats up for grabs, and whoever fills them gets to keep blaming Los Angeles for problems.

Cities from Lakewood to Malibu operate under service contracts, but they are much smaller. A Valley city, at 1.4 million residents, would be the sixth-largest in the country; for it not to provide its own services calls into question just what a city is.

Even some members of Valley VOTE, the main group backing secession, see the plan as inadequate. But they are among those who insisted before the study even got underway that secession go on the ballot by November 2002. That deadline was adopted by the commission, and it is now driving the process. The lead author of the new study admitted this week that his proposal was designed “to make sure it [secession] makes it on the ballot without being stopped by litigation.” But the new plan would only push the hard negotiations, and potential litigation, to a later date.

After the consultant issued an earlier proposal dividing city assets and employees, Los Angeles officials prepared an 800-page response raising objections on everything from water rights to union contracts. Secessionists, as usual, accused the city of trying to stall a vote. But their own application was a scant 15 pages and short on details. Because of the city’s objections and the secessionists’ lack of specifics, the consultant gave up on dividing assets and recommended that Los Angeles continue providing services to a Valley city.

But here’s the catch: This arrangement would be for only one to three years. After that, the new city could choose to contract instead with Los Angeles County or a private service provider. It could also, according to the proposal, “attempt to negotiate a transfer of employees, equipment and facilities from the city.”

Call it the vote-first, sue-later plan. Or, as the former mayor of Calabasas, a city that incorporated in 1991, told The Times, “I would take the deal, and then I would get the best attorneys I could afford.”

Residents on both sides of Mulholland Drive deserve to know exactly what they’re getting into before they vote on breaking apart their city. This proposal’s lack of answers is itself instructive: If the Valley and the rest of Los Angeles are so entwined that 18 months of study yielded a plan as vague as this, why split?