You Wanna Start Your Own City? Goodbye and Good Luck

In what might be the low point of his career, Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn went to an Encino park Saturday to lead a rally against San Fernando Valley secession, and 50 people showed up.

Hahn had a finger in the air to chants of “One L.A.,” but given the meager assemblage, it was more a case of public loitering than a rally.

At this point, I think Slim Jim may be doing more harm than good, and his handlers should consider locking him in his office the rest of the way. Why should the Valley stick with a mayor who, in a city of millions, can’t put more than four dozen people into a park on the most vital issue of his career?

You bus in the sick and infirm, and even the homeless, if you have to. But you do not, under any circumstances, show your face at a sad little confab of 50 lonely souls.

To tell you the truth, though, Hahn’s failure of leadership in keeping the city together may be a blessing in disguise. I was out of town last week, and with the benefit of time and distance, secession began to make more sense.

Look, this is a rocky marriage. Has been for a long time. And frankly, I’m growing weary of all the carping and moaning from professional whiners who’d have you believe that those of us who live south of Mulholland are picking the Valley’s pockets.

Instead of getting slapped around all summer just to be dumped in November, we ought to stand together, and, in unison, send a shout over the Hollywood Hills:

Get lost.

That’s right. You wanna start your own city? Go ahead, and good luck. I’m sure it’ll be a neat, tight little community of 1.35 million. No hacks, no boondoggles, no power grabs.

And by the way, you can call off the campaign for a new name, because a reader sent me a winner.

Less Angeles.

Bon voyage.

I don’t know if I can endure five more months of listening to the tired litany of reasons the Valley ought to secede. Here’s the promise of a nickel to the first person who can tell me why we ought to keep it.

Yeah, I know. The Valley pays its taxes. But the numbers offered up as an argument for secession don’t add up, as I read them, despite the claims of the Proposition 13-inspired crackpots who started this whole thing.

The gripe is that the Valley pays roughly 5% more in taxes than what it gets in services. But does anyone really believe you can build a huge new city from scratch and not burn through that 5% in about 10 minutes?

Besides which, the rap about getting cheated on cops-per-capita is the work of fools. In every city in America, you’ll find a higher concentration of cops in high-crime areas, keeping lawbreakers from escaping to well-heeled environs. Every once in a while, an enterprising marauder breaks through the blue line, sure.

But what happened when Rodney King made the mistake of entering the Valley? You know exactly what happened. Your tax dollars went to work in a big way.

So what’s the gripe?

Seriously, though, don’t let math or logic get in the way of creating a boiling, landlocked city with no Lakers and no beach, among other things. This isn’t about math, anyway, or the November ballot measure would go down in a ball of flames. It’s about the wounded psyche of the Valley, and its enduring sense that it gets no respect.

To be fair, the Valley has a legitimate gripe, but it’s a historical, not a current one. Real estate developers and other robber barons, including certain newspaper tycoons, sold the Garden of Eden to the devil, fattening their wallets on sprawl.

The city reached beyond natural borders and available resources, stealing water as needed and always, always laying concrete pathways to the farthest reaches of the promised land, even as the whole mess began to resemble hell’s parking lot.

We built a mistake.

We paved over our own history.

The Valley is right. We screwed this thing up pretty badly. But there are smart, impartial analysts out there who make a compelling argument that breaking up now will only add to the misery. The most serious problems--traffic, air quality, schools--won’t be any easier to fix, and might become even more intractable.

There is, however, a proud tradition around here of doing the wrong thing when it comes to public policy. This is no time to change course.

Besides, we’ve got to start thinking of ourselves in the basin. We can only wonder how much further along we’d be in creating a real downtown--a thriving center of commerce and culture--if we hadn’t been delivering services halfway to Magic Mountain.

It’s time to cut the Valley loose. Not for their sake, but our own. If the sprawl that defines the Valley was our original sin, secession must be our penance.

Go with God, Less Angeles.

And, please, take Jim Hahn with you.

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Steve Lopez writes Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com