The Jarvis Effect

On San Fernando Valley nights lately, if you have a long memory, you can almost sense Howard Jarvis’ ghost prowling the shopping centers and suburban neighborhoods where he found recruits for his Proposition 13, the state constitutional amendment that has forever limited the growth of government in California.

Jarvis was the prototype neighborhood character, a loud, unmannerly, cantankerous former pro boxer who loved a stiff drink almost as much as he loved bending his neighbors’ ears about crooked politicians and spendthrift bureaucrats.

He was out of place among the political, business and journalistic elite, who dismissed him as one of the crazy gadflies who turn out to rant at Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meetings. But he would have been the life of the party on a recent warm spring night when the Old Granada Hills Residents’ Group hosted a debate on Valley secession at a 1950s-style shopping center busy with people rushing to the local Trader Joe’s before closing time.

More than 225 people gathered that night in the shopping center’s community room to listen to lawyer Bill Powers, from the pro-secession group Valley VOTE, argue with political consultant Larry Levine of the anti-secession One Los Angeles organization.

It was just the kind of populist gathering Jarvis would have loved. Questions from the floor reflected a feeling that downtown had no respect for the issues driving the secession movement and threatening the residents’ group goal “to maintain, improve and preserve our unique neighborhood.” One man objected to the “alimony” payments that a new city would have to pay to Los Angeles. Another complained about the Sunshine Canyon garbage dump, east of Granada Hills, another about a Chatsworth development proposed by City Hall political power Ted Stein. A retired school principal conceded that, while secession itself would not break up the Los Angeles Unified School District, it could be a step in that direction. “Once the vote is held here, and it will be overwhelming,” he said, “we can tell the Legislature we can have a school district like L.A. once was.”

The spare room in the northern reaches of the Valley and the casually clad crowd seated in folding chairs seemed so remote from City Hall that they could well have been in another city already.

That feeling of separateness has made the Valley a prime recruiting ground for the grass-roots protest movements that periodically sweep through California. “There’s something about Valley people when they are organized,” said Cal State Northridge professor Tom Hogen-Esch, who studies secession movements. “These are people who feel disrespected. They are fighting for respect, in a sense.”

Personally, I’d like L.A. to stay together. I’ve reported from each community in the Valley, and they all contribute to the city’s greatness. But as I listened at the Granada Hills meeting, I sympathized. This was politics as it’s supposed to be--people expressing themselves with a clarity and force that has been drained from the television commercials and speeches of today’s campaigns. I felt the same when I walked into a crowded Jarvis headquarters in 1977 and met the Valleyites leading one of the nation’s great tax revolts--people who’d never made it into the address books of political journalists. Jarvis and his crew proved that you didn’t need to be on the political inside if you worked hard enough for a cause you believed in.

Lawyer Richard Close, chairman of Valley VOTE and president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn., remembers those days too. Property taxes were skyrocketing. The state had a huge and growing budget surplus. Neither the Legislature nor Gov. Jerry Brown could or would offer help. The Sherman Oaks group joined with other neighborhood organizations, collecting 200,000 protest letters in “Brown Bags.” They took them from the Valley to Sacramento in a caravan of cars and pickup trucks and tried to meet with Brown, getting as far as his chief of staff, Gray Davis, the current governor. “Nothing happened,” Close said.

Then came Jarvis. He attended a Sherman Oaks Homeowners Assn. meeting and urged members to sign his petitions. “We had no other options,” Close said.

If Valley secession has a Jarvis, Close is the man. I doubt if he mixes strong Bloody Marys for a reporter during an afternoon interview, as Jarvis did. And his background is different--law school, the Wharton School, years of legal practice. But, like Jarvis, he never concedes a point in a debate or a discussion. Nor does he give his opponent a chance to make a point. It’s attack, attack, attack, just as the old anti-tax crusader did a quarter of a century ago.

The secession movement is further blessed with opponents who feed Close’s image of them as elitists and insiders. Most of them would need MapQuest or a Thomas Bros. Guide to find their way to Granada Hills--much less to the Granada Hills Pavilion. There’s Eli Broad, the rich and influential Westsider who dreams of a great cultural center along downtown’s Grand Avenue but remains silent on issues that Valley residents most care about. And there’s Mayor James K. Hahn, cheerleader for a proposed downtown football stadium built with the assistance of taxpayer redevelopment funds. He should have been there a few years ago when I spoke to the Studio City Homeowners Assn. on the Staples Center controversy. The large meeting room was packed and it crackled with anger at the possibility that taxpayer funds would be used for the arena. Try the football stadium out on these people.

But if today’s secession movement has many elements in common with the Jarvis campaign--the populist fervor, the clueless opponents--it also has some crucial differences that could, in the end, cause its defeat.

Political and governmental consultant Joel Fox, who became a Jarvis aide and later headed the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Assn., noted that Proposition 13 had an easily grasped payoff for voters: It froze runaway property taxes. “The hard-dollar aspect is the difference,” he said. “You are not going to have the direct-cost issue” in the secession fight.

Bill Carrick, a chief strategist for the “no” campaign, agrees that while the Valley has “real grievances that have to be recognized,” it also has some obstacles to overcome. He believes that support for secession is “fairly shallow.” For example, he said, participants in focus groups said they supported secession because they thought it would break up the Los Angeles Unified School District. Told it would have no impact on the district, Carrick said, “they turned on a dime” against secession. And, most important, the vote on secession is citywide, meaning the majority of potential voters don’t share the Valley’s emotional commitment to the issue.

Proposition 13 was also boosted by some unanticipated last-minute occurrences. As Robert Kuttner wrote in his book on Proposition 13, “Revolt of the Haves,” the “hard-core faithful gave extremist initiatives an early lead until the wider electorate appreciated the fine print, gradually eroding the lead, and a ‘crossover’ was reached a few weeks before the election. It began to look as though Proposition 13 might just follow the pattern. By late April, the ‘no’ campaign was within a few points of Jarvis and gaining.” Then the new Los Angeles County property tax assessments came out. The average assessment would increase 125%, Kuttner recalled. Some would triple. Finally, in the weeks leading up to the election, the state surplus was revealed to be $5billion. The anti-13 campaign collapsed.

This time out, there are no property taxes or surpluses to come to the aid of the secessionists, nothing they can promise that would put sure money in voters’ pockets.

So does secession have a chance? Who knows. We do know that populism is a powerful and unpredictable force. Oddball politicians and simplistic solutions have often transfixed Southern California. Howard Jarvis knew this. Too bad he’s not around to enjoy the fight.