Helping Ratchet Up Cities’ Relations

Like siblings who have outgrown their shared bedroom, the 15 cities that make up the South Bay often get into spats. They compete for Home Depots or hotels, squabble over traffic and sometimes even sue one another.

On the fourth Thursday night of each month, however, representatives from these cities sit down at a U-shaped table and do something that, by the standards of local government, is a bit unusual: They work together.

The directors of the South Bay Cities Council of Governments -- one member from each city, plus representatives from the Harbor Area of Los Angeles -- tackle issues that confront them all: traffic-clogged streets; bad air; high energy costs.

The South Bay group is viewed by experts as one of the better examples of the “new regionalism,” a movement gradually taking root, almost unnoticed by the public, in California and across the nation as leaders of cities, counties and even school districts increasingly encounter issues they cannot resolve alone.

The hurdles are considerable, including a long tradition of “home rule” and, in California, a municipal financing system that fosters competition for sales tax dollars, not cooperation.

Yet leaders of metropolitan regions from Birmingham, Ala., to San Francisco Bay are forging ways to work together on some common problems without creating new layers of government or yielding their autonomy.

Hundreds of these groups are popping up nationwide with names that quickly morph into odd-sounding acronyms. In California, they are called Councils of Governments, or COGs. There are 13 in Southern California alone.

William Fulton, a planning consultant and co-author of “The Regional City,” sees the movement as “taking the existing players and putting them together in combinations and venues where they can get something done together.”

“In the past 15 years or so, I have seen local governments more receptive to working with their neighbors than they used to be,” Fulton said.

Not every attempt succeeds. Progress has been slow, for example, in Ventura County, Fulton said, and a recent campaign to broaden regional decision-making in San Diego County stalled in the Legislature.

Tangible Benefits

But in the South Bay, thanks to an energetic leader and an agenda that steers clear of divisive issues, the Council of Governments has racked up modest but tangible benefits for residents. They include:

* A conservation program that provides rebates for residents who buy energy-efficient appliances.

* A grant-funded project to ease the flow of traffic along the area’s notoriously jammed routes to the San Diego Freeway.

* A Traffic Alert System that enables drivers to learn about road construction projects by logging on to www.southbay cities.org, the group’s Web site, or to www.southbaytraffic.net.

* A survey of bus riders that helped guide the MTA on how to improve service.

It’s wonky stuff, but they’re the kinds of issues that can make a neighborhood more livable.

In addition, the agency is monitoring an unpopular move to split the 310 area code, working with the South Bay Economic Development Partnership to bring jobs to the area, weighing in regularly on the future of Los Angeles International Airport and looking for ways to help keep Los Angeles Air Force Base -- a major South Bay economic engine -- open in El Segundo.

In February, the COG hosted its annual general assembly, designed for government, business and civic leaders but open to the public. This year’s theme was “Hometown Security.”

The towns that make up the South Bay agency are a disparate lot.

They range from the gated Rolling Hills on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, where many of the wealthy residents keep horses on their spacious lots, to blue-collar Hawthorne and Lawndale, where civic leaders are trying to lure businesses to a tired stretch of Hawthorne Boulevard. Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Redondo Beach often are preoccupied with how to handle the crowds that flock to their seashores.

Unless you count Los Angeles, whose Harbor Area neighborhoods are represented in the council, Inglewood and Torrance are the only cities with more than 100,000 residents. But together, members of the agency represent almost 870,000 people.

“I guess you could say there is some sibling rivalry here, but I think that has been greatly reduced” since the group became more active, said Ken Blackwood, a City Council member in 20,000-resident Lomita and this year’s COG chairman. “You just don’t read as much about disputes between cities anymore.”

Traffic Resolution

Sandra Jacobs, a City Council member in El Segundo who headed the COG last year, agreed. She recalled the agency’s role in a tense dispute between Redondo Beach and Manhattan Beach.

Responding to residents’ complaints about commuters who were using their neighborhood streets, Manhattan Beach erected barricades that funneled the traffic to some north Redondo residential streets. Redondo threatened to sue, and the two cities seemed at an impasse until their City Council representatives met at a COG meeting and started to chat.

“I saw them sit down during a break in our meeting, listen to each other and come up with a solution,” Jacobs said.

Not every dispute has such a happy ending, of course, and agency staff members take care to stay out of intercity squabbles.

The council, for example, did not take a stand when Hermosa Beach last year sued Redondo Beach over its controversial “Heart of the City” development proposal.

“We try to provide a setting for council members to work together productively,” said COG Executive Director Jacki Bacharach.

Much of the nuts-and-bolts work gets done by committee, freeing the board to whip through an agenda laden with technical topics in about two hours.

The agenda reflects the agency’s efforts to concentrate on members’ needs but “not overburden them with our activities,” said Bacharach, a former member of the Rancho Palos Verdes City Council.

She runs the Council of Governments from the family room of her split-level home, surrounded by photos of her husband, children and grandchildren. The arrangement saves the organization office costs, and Bacharach’s $180,000-a-year contract covers her salary plus those of four part-time staff members, who work from their homes.

The bulk of the agency’s $210,000 annual operating budget comes from member cities’ dues. Last year, Bacharach successfully sought a steep increase and a new formula for calculating membership fees, based on population and municipal expenditures.

The idea was to wean the organization from its principal source of funding, the Southern California Assn. of Governments, which was having its own budget problems.

Bacharach also saw the cities’ decision to at least double -- and in some cases triple -- their stake in the agency as “a complete validation of what we’ve done.”

The South Bay Cities unit formed in 1994, replacing a longtime, loosely organized association that produced little more than a monthly dinner get-together for local officials.

The present organization serves as an information clearing house and takes on projects, from applying for grants to compiling data on municipal salaries, that its cities could ill afford on their own.

Bacharach, who formed a public affairs consulting firm after leaving her City Council seat, signed on as executive director in 1998. Many credit her with taking the association to a high point in accomplishment and credibility.

Bacharach’s visibility in the new regionalism movement grew in 2001, when she was named to the Speaker’s Commission on Regionalism, a one-year project conceived by then-Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg. Its report explored ways the state could help foster cooperation among cities and other agencies without adding layers of government or undermining local authority.

But Bacharach likes to keep attention on the local organization’s achievements and on the elected officials whose cooperation, she says, is crucial to its work.

A typical council meeting is devoid of the political posturing that is the hallmark of many city council sessions. Although the meetings are open to the public, the audience is made up mostly of bureaucrats and consultants.

And in possibly the best sign that the agency seems to be working, it has attracted only one “gadfly” so far. But he doesn’t berate the officials. He often can be found in the front row, eating cookies from the refreshment table or, occasionally, dozing.