Drive to Secede Proves Persistent

For years, when elected officials and political power brokers in the San Fernando Valley talked about the small group of relentless activists who wanted the area to secede from Los Angeles, the conversation always wound up in the same place: Secession wasn’t a real threat.

But now, secession proposals for the Valley, Hollywood and harbor area are making their way toward the November ballot, and nearly half of Los Angeles voters say they would support a civic breakup.

People on both sides of the issue say that years of downplaying both the determination of the secessionists and the seriousness of their concerns has strengthened the movement. Secession advocates, who might otherwise have been brought into the political fold, were further alienated, and many L.A. residents, who might have benefited from serious reform, simply became fed up.

“Every time the subject would come up, somebody said, ‘Are you going to organize opposition to this?’” said Larry Levine, a Van Nuys political consultant who now heads the anti-secession group One Los Angeles. “We said, ‘No, it’s going to go away. There’s no need to.’

“Finally, last fall, we realized it was not going to go away and we had to do something.”

Six months later, the opposition is organized.

Several of the region’s biggest power brokers, including political consultants Bill Carrick and William Wardlaw, former Mayor Richard J. Riordan, and billionaire developer Eli Broad have signed on to fight secession.

“There was a period where everybody thought it was just dead,” said Broad, who has donated $100,000 to Mayor James K. Hahn’s anti-secession campaign. “I think it’s clear everyone is taking it very seriously right now.”

The opposition coalition, led by Hahn, intends to raise $5 million for the campaign, which also will be fought with local groups such as Levine’s in each breakaway region.

At the same time, Hahn is working to improve city services. The mayor has put white-gloved police officers to work directing traffic at busy intersections in the Valley and Hollywood. He has pushed hard to help communities create neighborhood councils, which are meant to make it easier for residents to make their wishes and concerns known to city officials.

Riordan saw secession in moral terms, as an abandonment of poor communities by wealthier ones. He pushed for reform of the City Charter in 1999, in part to respond to unhappiness with the way the city was being run. The process created a stronger role for the mayor and established a citywide neighborhood council system that is taking hold this year.

For Riordan, “this is one of his gut issues,” said Robin Kramer, who served as Riordan’s chief of staff for five years. “He spoke out on this and was not shy on this. This is why as mayor he felt so passionately about charter reform.”

But the charter reform effort was also swamped in political infighting, resulting in two separate charter reform commissions--one elected and backed by Riordan and one appointed by the City Council.

In the end, secessionists felt neighborhood councils were not given enough formal power, and some involved believed their concerns were dismissed by city leaders.

C. Edward Dilkes, an expert on municipal law who served briefly as director of the elected commission and then as its special counsel, now backs secession in Hollywood, where he lives.

His efforts at reform in Los Angeles, he said, did little more than earn him a reputation as a malcontent.

“I have been seriously engaged in an effort to reform Los Angeles for 25 years,” said Dilkes, who has spent most of his career working as a city attorney for small municipalities. “But those efforts are not viewed as the efforts of a guy who has a commitment to local government. They’re viewed as the meddling of a crank.”

Secession Seemed Too Drastic to Succeed

Kramer said she and others in that administration did not discount the discontent among some city residents, and worked to reform the City Charter to respond to those concerns.

But Kramer said she initially did not believe a secession effort would gain ground--not because it was “quirky or inappropriate,” but because it was such a drastic and unprecedented step.

“I’ve had an evolving understanding of this,” Kramer said. “I thought it would never make it to serious consideration, let alone the ballot.”

The Valley secession movement, which is the oldest and best organized of the three, began in 1975, when a group of political neophytes formed CIVICC, the Committee Investigating Valley Independent City/County.

Their rebellion was crushed when the California Legislature, in part thanks to lobbying by then-Mayor Tom Bradley, gave large cities veto power over secession, even if voters approved it.

But the leaders of the group became powerful over the years: Hal Bernson, then the owner of a jeans store at the Northridge Fashion Center, was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1979 and serves as an alternate on the Local Agency Formation Commission, the state panel overseeing the secession applications. Larry Calemine, who went on to help develop the huge Warner Center and Porter Ranch projects, is now the commission’s executive director.

Another CIVICC member, Paula Boland, was elected to the Legislature in 1990 and sponsored a bill to repeal the city secession veto. That bill, which passed in 1997 in the form of a compromise pushed by state Sen. Tom McClintock (R-Thousand Oaks) and Assemblyman Bob Hertzberg (D-Sherman Oaks) after Boland left the Legislature, allowed secession to go forward if it was approved by voters in both the breakaway region and the city at large.

Spurred by the change in the law, activists including Richard Close--then as now president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn.--Jeff Brain and others began gathering signatures for a petition to place Valley secession on the ballot.

They reached out to nascent secession movements in Hollywood and the harbor area, offering expertise, funding and even recommendations for consultants who would develop budgets and other plans for the proposed new cities.

Secession also gained momentum thanks to a couple of unproven truisms in Los Angeles politics: A candidate cannot win the mayoralty without the support of the San Fernando Valley and no one can be elected to the City Council, the Legislature or Congress from the Valley without the support of the secessionists.

As a result, few area politicians were willing to criticize secession, or even vote against legislative action that made it possible.

Moreover, in summer 1999, as Valley secession proponents were beginning the process of putting their proposal on the ballot, then-Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa was preparing his bid to become mayor of Los Angeles.

Villaraigosa, along with Hertz- berg, led an effort to secure $1.8 million to pay for a LAFCO study of the secession proposal.

Add to that the timing of the mayor’s race: Villaraigosa, Hahn, state Controller Kathleen Connell, City Councilman Joel Wachs, U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Los Angeles) and others faced off just last year, as the progress of the state study made a vote on Valley secession seem more likely every month.

Candidates Backed Vote on Secession

The candidates adopted a mantra already in use by other politicians with ties to the Valley: Whatever their personal views on secession, the people should be allowed to vote.

“I believe that it will divide people instead of bringing them closer together,” Villaraigosa said at the time. “However, 132,000 San Fernando Valley residents who signed petitions in support of secession indicate strongly to us in Sacramento that this issue must be studied.”

Later this month, the proposal to wrest the Valley from Los Angeles is expected to move forward significantly, when the final report from the LAFCO study--penned by Calemine--is released. By June, the commission plans to decide whether the proposals will go before the voters in November.

If that happens--and indications are that at least two and perhaps all three of the proposals will make the ballot--it will be a day that many did not see coming.

“I don’t think anybody ever thought secession had a prayer,” said county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who chairs the LAFCO board and served as a Los Angeles city councilman for nearly 20 years starting in 1975. “Nobody at City Hall did.”

Hahn said he believes city officials did take the concerns of secessionists seriously, and responded by rewriting the City Charter and creating the neighborhood council system.

But the secession process, with its slow march toward the ballot, was set in motion before the city began responding the dissatisfied residents, the mayor said.

“Once the petitions were signed, it’s inevitable that we are at this point,” he said. “You begin this inexorable LAFCO process.... You’re headed toward having it on the ballot, even if people have a change of heart.

“That snowball keeps rolling down the mountain.”