Island Dream for Cities, County

It may be a planning headache, but city and county officials have embarked on a three-year mission to annex as many as 50 unincorporated “islands.”

The tiny islands dotting the county -- some of them smaller than a city block -- are chunks of land that for one reason or another have never been swallowed up by cities. Even if an island sits smack in the middle of a town, everything from trash pickup to police service must be provided by the county.

“For a county to provide municipal services in widely disparate areas, it’s just not cost-effective,” said Candy Haggard, who oversees annexations for Orange County.

“Cities can much better handle those services.”

So far, nine of the land parcels have been annexed: seven in Costa Mesa, one in Brea and one in Laguna Niguel. More than 30 are in the process of annexation, according to Ken Lee, project manager at the Orange County Local Agency Formation Commission.

Under a state bill that streamlined the process, the islands can be annexed regardless of what the people who live there think.

But annexing larger islands can prove difficult. In those cases, residents can force a special election or kill the effort if they collect enough signatures.

Although it may seem practical for the islands to be annexed, many residents have grown accustomed to their pace of life, which can be somewhat rural even in a small pocket within a city.

“People like things the way they are,” Haggard said. “Often, people are fearful the city will be more restrictive than the county has been.”

And sometimes, Haggard said, it may just be that they want to keep their chickens.

In Santa Ana Heights, residents near a country club who live south of Mesa Drive effectively terminated the annexation procedure when 69% of registered voters filed protests.

In Yorba Linda, residents were unable to end the process, but will vote on it in the next general election.

“Most of the homeowners’ opinion is that if it’s not broke, why fix it?” said Yorba Linda resident John Taylor. “Less government is better.”

The annexed area would take in the historic Yorba Cemetery, which dates back to 1858 and is the burial site of the city’s founders. It is now operated by the county, and critics of annexation say the city has made no provision to preserve the cemetery -- and has bulldozed a nearby historic hacienda to make way for development.

Beyond that, residents complain that the city is embroiled in too many lawsuits, including one in which the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District has accused the city’s Redevelopment Agency of illegally pocketing tax funds.

A Superior Court judge ruled that the agency owes the district more than $240 million, but the city has appealed.

“I don’t want to be part of this mess,” Taylor said. “They’ve stolen from their own school district.”

If the annexation is approved, residents of the island will pay street light and maintenance fees of less than $60 a year, said Yorba Linda senior planner Bruce Cook.

Glen Hardwick, a 38-year Yorba Linda resident, has lived in both the city proper and in the county island that is fighting annexation. When he had to deal with city planners to build a tennis court, he said they didn’t come when they said they would and often failed to follow through.

“Why jump onto a bandwagon of not-so-wonderful things?” Hardwick said.

On the city’s end, Cook said the annexation is being pushed by the county. And now that the process has been initiated, there’s no going back.

“We obviously would get property taxes, but we’re also assuming an additional burden for services,” Cook said.

“I don’t think we did an exhaustive study to determine whether it would be a revenue enhancer or revenue drain, but experience tells us it would be close to a wash.”