Support for a Valley City Is Growing

A majority of San Fernando Valley voters believes the region should secede from Los Angeles, as does nearly half the electorate citywide, a new Los Angeles Times poll shows.

Secession led 55% to 36% in the Valley and 46% to 38% in the city as a whole--meaning all of Los Angeles, including the Valley. The balance of voters in each category are undecided.

Support for secession citywide is up 10% from a year ago. In the Valley, it has increased 4%, and its support there appears most firm.

The findings in the latest poll are close, however, to those of a Times Poll conducted in March 1999, which found that a majority of Valley residents backed the idea but that it was viewed less favorably outside that area.

For secession to win, state law requires that a majority of voters in the Valley and the entire city approve it.

The poll findings come at a time when breakaway proposals for the Valley, Hollywood and the harbor area are gaining visibility.

Just last week, the state commission that oversees the formation of new cities concluded that Hollywood would be financially healthy if it became independent of Los Angeles. The Local Agency Formation Commission has given similar, preliminary evaluations of the finances of a Valley city and a harbor-area city.

Secession questions for all three regions are expected to appear on the November ballot.

“I just think Los Angeles is too big,” said poll respondent Diane Tomczak, who lives in San Pedro and strongly favors Valley secession, in a follow-up interview. “There are too many people and it’s too hard to govern such a vast area.”

Tomczak said her support for Valley secession was even stronger than her sympathy for the breakaway movement in San Pedro, because she believes that the more affluent Valley will be better able to survive on its own than the harbor area.

Karon Hovey, who lives in the Porter Ranch community of the west San Fernando Valley, said she will support secession if it means improvements in city services, including police, fire and transportation.

“For 50 years, we’ve [lived in] Los Angeles, and I still identify with it,” Hovey said. “But I really feel that this part of Los Angeles is neglected.”

The pro-secession sentiment has grown in the last year, even though residents are very upbeat about the state of the city, the poll showed. Two in three respondents said things in Los Angeles are going well, up from 51% in a Times Poll conducted in April 1997. Slightly fewer than three in 10 said things are going badly, down from 46% five years ago.

Hahn Calls Secession ‘Harebrained Idea’

Similar proportions of Valley residents voiced approval and disapproval about the city’s state of affairs.

On Saturday, Mayor James K. Hahn reiterated his long-held opposition to secession, calling the proposed breakups a “harebrained idea” and questioning the state commission’s competence in evaluating the plans.

Hahn is beefing up his ranks of political advisors for the anti-secession campaign, bringing on two of the region’s most influential political players, attorney William Wardlaw and Democratic consultant Bill Carrick.

Secession opponents hope to raise $5 million to defeat the measure at the polls in November.

If the poll findings are any indication, the Hahn team has its work cut out for it, said Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus.

Just 9% of voters in the Valley and 16% citywide said they had not yet made up their minds, a relatively low level of indecision for a ballot initiative this early in the process, Pinkus said.

Still, she said, there remains room for shifts in voter sentiment before November.

Although voters in the Valley appeared fairly hardened in their support for secession, with 42% strongly in favor and 13% somewhat in favor, those in the rest of the city seemed less certain.

About half of those polled citywide who favored secession expressed only moderate support. About a third of those opposed citywide also listed their feelings as moderate.

Voters in the moderate column are most likely to be swayed by arguments for or against the proposal, Pinkus said, and will probably be a focus of the campaign.

The poll, of 798 registered voters throughout Los Angeles, was conducted from Saturday through Tuesday. It has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

In the harbor region and the southern part of the city, support for Valley secession was high, with 48% in favor, 35% opposed and 17% undecided, the poll showed. But in the swath of Los Angeles that stretches from the Beverly Hills border to the Pasadena line, 39% of respondents supported the proposal, with 44% opposed and 17% undecided.

On the Westside, voters were about evenly split, with 37% in favor, 40% opposed and 23% undecided.

Citywide, Latinos were 52% in favor of secession and 29% opposed. Whites followed, with 47% in favor and 39% opposed. The measure had the least support among African Americans, with just 33% in favor and 47% opposed.

Grappling With the Merits of Secession

“It seems peculiar,” said Leandro Rideau, 19, an African American security guard who lives in Wilshire Center. “I don’t really know what they’re trying to gain from it.”

Bill Moses, an actor-producer who lives in Pacific Palisades, said he fears that if Los Angeles becomes two cities, neither one will be big enough to have real economic and political clout. In addition, he said, Los Angeles would lose revenue that it needs to provide services to poorer parts of the city.

“I really don’t see what the merits are,” Moses said.

But for Angela Jones, who lives in Van Nuys, the potential gain from secession is palpable.

Jones, a mother of two small children who identified herself to pollsters as Latina, said she hopes a new Valley city will provide better police protection.

Now, she said, the area near her home has “gone berserk” with prostitutes who ply their trade along Sepulveda Boulevard.

In a smaller city, she said, police and city officials might be more responsive.

“In Burbank they pay more attention [to residents],” she said. “I think if the city is smaller, they’ll pay more attention here.”

The March 1999 poll found that 60% of Valley voters favored secession and 30% were opposed. Citywide, 47% supported it and 39% opposed it.

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Times staff writer Matea Gold contributed to this report.