Copyright 1996 Institute for Public Affairs

December 23, 1996 / January 5, 1997

SECTION: CITIES; Vol. 21; No. 03; Pg. 18

LENGTH: 2358 words

HEADLINE: Divorce, California-style;
Secession fever

BYLINE: MARK PURCELL, MARK PURCELL IS A PH.D. CANDIDATE IN GEOGRAPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA-LOS ANGELES.

BODY:
"There it is, take it."

So urged engineer William Mulholland in 1913 at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Owens Valley aqueduct, the first large-scale project to bring water to Los Angeles from its California hinterland. Though Mulholland was talking about the water flowing from the new aqueduct, he could just as easily have been referring to the San Fernando Valley, a swath of more than 200 square miles of dusty orchards, farms and empty land that lay just north of Los Angeles across the Santa Monica Mountains.

As Jake Gittes unwittingly discovers in Chinatown, the Owens Valley aqueduct was the product of a great land swindle. In the early part of this century, a powerful syndicate bought up much of the San Fernando Valley, then mostly agricultural land, at bargain prices. It then approached the water board of the City of Los Angeles--on which one of the members of the syndicate, M.E. Sherman, sat--and proposed building a monumental aqueduct from the water-rich Owens Valley to arid Los Angeles. The proposal was put before the voters of Los Angeles (which at the time did not include the San Fernando Valley), who passed a $ 25 million bond measure to pay for it. After the aqueduct was built, the syndicate sold their holdings, reaping an estimated profit of $ 10 million.

In the same year as Mulholland's famous speech, the Municipal Annexation Commission made it policy that Los Angeles would supply water and power to an outlying area only if it agreed to be annexed to the city. Because Los Angeles controlled the Owens Valley aqueduct, many unincorporated areas voted for annexation after the aqueduct opened. Among these was the arid San Fernando Valley, which agreed to be annexed to the City of Los Angeles in 1915, more than doubling the city's size.

But today, Valley homeowners are seeking to annul this shotgun wedding. The San Fernando Valley secession movement suggests a Big Bang theory for cities. In the early part of this century, Los Angeles, like many urban centers, rapidly expanded, finally stabilizing at about 450 square miles. Now, the city may be on the verge of a dramatic implosion as communities like the San Fernando Valley, San Pedro, Venice, the Westside, and Westchester threaten to splinter off and leave behind a mostly poor, non-white and revenue-strapped Los Angeles.

This implosion, if it happens, will be driven by a long-standing frustration with a stubbornly aloof and unresponsive municipal government. But it will also be driven by a view of cities that has become increasingly popular: that they are not interdependent, interlocking communities, but rather public-sector shopping malls where people ought to get what they pay for. The share of city services an area receives, the argument goes, should correspond to the share of taxes it pays in.

The marriage between the Valley and the city was always an uneasy one. As farms and fruit trees were plowed under to build tract homes and strip malls, the Valley changed from a mostly rural citrus producer to a residential and commercial area. Residents and businesses in the Valley required the same extensive government services as suburban areas everywhere: a fire department, police, sewers, street maintenance and the like. The growing need for government services was coupled in the '70s with a period of high inflation that dramatically drove up house values--and property taxes. As their taxes ballooned, Valley residents began expecting more and more from City Hall. As expectations outstripped city services, Valley frustration mounted.

Growing out of this frustration was the Committee to Investigate an Independent Valley City/County (CIVICC), led by prominent business people and supported by homeowners and small-business owners. In 1977, CIVICC commissioned a study by a Valley College professor that claimed the San Fernando Valley was paying much more in taxes to the city than it was receiving in services. The CIVICC movement grew and soon hatched an ambitious secession plan. The plan called for the Valley to be annexed to the tiny independent city of San Fernando and then secede, forming its own city. The deal fell apart after a dispute arose over how much of the Valley the city of San Fernando would retain after the separation, but it came close enough to succeeding to elicit a strong response from the City of Los Angeles. In 1977, Mayor Tom Bradley and the City Council recruited state Assemblyman John Knox to push a bill through the state Legislature giving city councils a veto over secession proposals. That veto power, which stands today, is considered by many an insurmountable obstacle to secession.

Republican Assemblywoman Paula Boland, from the Valley community of Granada Hills, authored a bill this year that would have revoked that veto power. The Boland bill sailed through the state Assembly, but was narrowly defeated in the state Senate. However, the successor to Boland's Assembly seat, Republican Tom McClintock, has promised to continue the fight by introducing legislation similar to the Boland bill, all but guaranteeing that another legislative battle over secession will be waged next year.

Many observers dismiss secessionists as political opportunists and the secession movement as a concoction of the Valley's Daily News. Those who do so underestimate an experienced and efficient political force: homeowners. If a Boland-like bill becomes law, Valley homeowners, who are well-organized veterans of many political battles, will take a central role in initiating a secession proposal. Leading the way are the homeowners associations in the affluent hills of the southern Valley: Tarzana, Encino, Woodland Hills, Studio City and Sherman Oaks (ironically, named for M.E. Sherman, who was among those responsible for joining the Valley to Los Angeles in the first place).

Each neighborhood is organized into one, or sometimes two, homeowners associations, which provide the institutional and organizational structure for political action. These associations, each representing some 1,500 households, are organized into larger coalitions such as the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations (in the Santa Monica Mountains), the San Fernando Valley Federation (in the flatlands of the Valley) and the Westside Civic Federation (on the Westside of Los Angeles). Most associations have voluntary membership and nominal dues. They serve as a sort of union for homeowners, speaking with a collective voice on issues that concern their membership.

Those issues are not limited to unsightly handbills and skateboarding at the local parking lot. The associations have helped enact important citywide and statewide policies. Homeowners groups were a crucial element in the campaign for Proposition 13, the well-known 1978 initiative that slashed property taxes, resulting in an upward redistribution of income in the state. They were important in "Busstop," the campaign to limit school busing from the inner city to the suburbs. They spearheaded the slow-growth movement of the '80s, which successfully limited the kind and amount of development in affluent areas. They successfully backed "the other Boland bill," which made it easier to divide up the Los Angeles Unified School District. Now, they have turned their attention to secession, creating an organization called Valley Organized Together for Empowerment (Valley VOTE) to lobby for the Boland bill and to support the likely 1997 bill.

The Valley has long been stereotyped as a lily-white bedroom community where the Brady Bunch frolic. Already inaccurate in the '50s and '60s, that stereotype has become even less fitting in the '90s as the Asian and Latino communities in the Valley have expanded. The white population of Los Angeles as a whole has declined from 48.3 percent in 1980 to 37.5 percent in 1990. Over the same period, people with Hispanic surnames in the U.S. Census have shot up from 27.6 percent of the city's population in 1980 to 39.3 percent 10 years later. The Valley has changed in pace with the wider city. The Valley's Latino population has increased dramatically, while its white population has remained relatively constant. The Latino population has grown in the historically Latino Eastern Valley and also has begun to expand westward toward the historically white areas in the Western Valley on the other side of the 405 freeway.

The question of race is inescapably imbricated in the secession issue. Because the Valley is quite diverse ethnically, if the whole area became independent, it would only be slightly whiter than the remaining city. However, if the Valley were split into two cities along the 405 freeway, as in several plans now being floated, the western city would be considerably whiter than other areas of the former Los Angeles. Critics charge secessionists with racism and with white flight. But secessionists vigorously deny the charge.

The homeowners associations argue that the city government is too large and inefficient to be responsive to their needs. Each Los Angeles City Council member represents about 250,000 people (by comparison, each council member in New York represents roughly half that many), and each county supervisor has about 1,800,000 constitutents. Valley residents complain of the City Council's neglect and arrogant indifference, and of their lack of local control. In particular, they criticize the city government for devoting attention and money to downtown Los Angeles, the inner city and Hollywood while ignoring the Valley.

Linked to the feeling of being ignored is the pervasive sense that the city is somehow cheating the Valley. "We feel shortchanged," says Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Association. "We don't get the services we feel we should based on the taxes that we pay into the system. I think most people here feel disenfranchised with the City of Los Angeles." A recent article in the Daily News fanned the flames. The piece claimed that the Valley did not get its "fair share" from the city because, according to the paper's calculations, the Valley pays 31.5 percent of the city's taxes and receives only 29.8 percent of its services. "For many years the people of the Valley believed they were being shortchanged," a press release from Valley VOTE trumpeted. "Now we have the evidence."

City Council member Hal Berson, who was a leader in the CIVICC movement as a businessman and now represents the Northeast Valley, thinks the Los Angeles City Council clings to the veto because they don't want to lose the Valley cash cow. "If you're taking advantage of somebody, and taking three dollars from them and giving them back one dollar in services," he says, "I think you can understand why the city is afraid the Valley will leave." Valley residents complain that they are unfairly expected to subsidize the needs of other parts of the city. "It's like the farmer who grows all the food, and all the neighbors come and take it, and he starves to death," says Gordon Murley, president of the Woodland Hills Homeowners Association, summing up Valley residents' frustration.

Critics charge secessionists with trying to take the money and run, of wanting to flee--rather than help solve--the urban problems on the other side of the hill. At stake is the notion of what it means to be part of an urban community. If a city is organized according to the principle that each area must fund its own needs and pay in taxes what it draws out, then the gulf between poorer and richer neighborhoods in our nation's cities will inevitably widen. Secession is the logical conclusion of that guiding idea. Will Valley residents abandon the city, leaving a Balkanized and poorer Los Angeles in their wake? Only the future will tell. And that future, as always in Los Angeles, will be upon us sooner than we expect.

Secession movements have emerged in northwest Washington, D.C., northeast South Carolina, central Florida, St. Louis and even southern Brazil. In each case, wealthier, whiter areas are talking about secession as a remedy for the outflow of revenue to local governments perceived as unresponsive.

In Seattle, for instance, you can hear an eerie redux of the arguments made by San Fernando Valley homeowners. Middle- and upper-income residents of the affluent, mostly white suburb of West Seattle feel they are being neglected by the city government. "We don't see the investment in our area that we see downtown," complains Charlie Chong, a leader of the movement. Secessionists in West Seattle complain they pay more in taxes than they receive in services and worry about development ruining West Seattle's character. In 1994, the city published a land-use plan that would have allowed an increase in low-income housing in West Seattle. Residents threatened to secede, arguing that if they had control over land-use decisions, they would plan for lower density, more libraries and increased police protection.

More famous is Staten Island, where homeowners have sought to give political teeth to their geographical separation from the rest of New York City. The island is 80 percent white, and the median income of islanders is higher than in any other borough in the city. Though all studies have shown that Staten Island pays less in taxes than it receives in services, residents nevertheless feel they are being shortchanged by the city government. Secessionists also worry that the city's urban problems are beginning to spill over onto the island. "The majority of problems on Staten Island are sent here by the city," says Guy Crowl, a Staten Island resident and secession advocate.

In 1993, Staten Island voted to approve a new city charter, and a state-appointed commission has authored a bill that would enact that charter and create an independent Staten Island. The state Legislature, however, ruled that Albany cannot consider a measure that so affects the future of New York City without a request to consider the measure from the mayor and the City Council of New York. The Staten Island case will be fought in the courts for the foreseeable future. --M.P.

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