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See Calling the cops and The San Fernando Valley's hottest political issue at the end of the century has its roots in 1962
By the time the city's San Fernando Valley-based 911 dispatch center opens in October 2002, 10 years will have passed from the time voters approved the bond measure to build it.
City officials are giddy about the possibility of reducing police and fire response times to emergencies, retaining operators and building a duplicate facility to one downtown.
But what took so long? Why did Valley residents have to suffer with some of the slowest response times for so long? Why did the Valley have to exert all of its political pressure to persuade the city to build the West Hills center, when they were assured funding was provided for it in 1992's Proposition M bond measure?
Throughout his time as mayor, Richard Riordan has vigorously tried to improve public safety and with the leadership of Police Chief Bernard C. Parks he has done that in several areas. The city's murder and violent crime rates have decreased, and correspondingly residents' sense of safety has risen.
Still, in the Valley, there is a gap. Despite the perception that the Valley has less crime, fewer rapes, fewer murders and less gang activity than the rest of the city, its residents still are entitled to adequate police services.
With the reassignment of officers from the West Valley station to other divisions across the city, the fight against crime has gotten considerably more difficult no matter how captains use technology to target criminal activity. The new 911 center will help, but nothing takes the place of uniformed officers who can respond to calls. The city must step up its recruiting efforts, even in the face of the awful and embarrassing corruption scandal at the Rampart Division.
But now that one promise from the Proposition M measure is beginning to come to fruition there are several others, including replacement police and fire stations that were part of the deal. While some progress has been made, the Valley has not gotten its fair share. Just ask the officers who work at West Valley.
There is no time like the present for the city to continue its bid to improve the LAPD's infrastructure in the San Fernando Valley.
Riordan and Parks want to make L.A. the safest big city in the United States, but they need public support to force the City Council to come to grips with the fact the Valley is part of Los Angeles, for the time being at least.
That was the year the San Fernando Valley Better Government Committee launched a study into how Los Angeles spent tax revenue generated in the Valley. Relying on the city budget, committee leaders contended only 20 cents from every Valley tax dollar came back to the region in city services.
"Some people were very tenacious and we found it and were all shocked," recalled Ruth Richter, a Winnetka businesswoman and longtime civic activist who worked on the committee. They began discussing breaking away from Los Angeles. "We were pretty strong. I think we would have succeeded in a public vote. It just sort of stalled out," Richter recalled.
But the movement got the attention of city fathers. It also left burning embers of discontent that would spark secessionist fires in the mid-1970s and again in the late 1990s. The latest effort has been the most successful. Advocates in March qualified a petition calling for a study on the financial impact of the proposed split on both a Valley city and what would remain of Los Angeles.
The Local Agency Formation Commission expects to hire consultants in February to start the study. A public vote is not expected until at least 2002. "Now clearly is the most opportune time," said H. Eric Shockman, a USC political science professor.
Splitting the city into two or more separate municipalities will require a majority vote both in the seceding areas and what remains of Los Angeles. "That's the big whammy, and I think it's going to be very difficult, even with a LAFCO study," Shockman said. "It's going to be a very bloody fight."
Valley veterans of battles downtown said they don't want to wage war over cityhood. They hope the study provides a full and accurate picture of city government so voters can decide the merits of a municipal divorce. "Instead of just running out and saying we want to detach because we said so, it's much better to say we're for a study into reorganizing the city of Los Angeles. We are holding to the idea that's better for everyone," said Bob Scott, a Valley attorney assisting the effort led by Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment.
Taking a different view is John Whitaker, who lives in Northridge and works downtown as a real estate attorney and board member for the Central City Association. He said the Valley and other areas benefit from being part of a metropolis composed of many diverse elements. "To those of us who have been involved in promoting L.A. as a world-class city and attempting to bring major companies into the area and promote our city, we've now turned the corner and it seems a shame to get into a battle that may send the wrong message," he said. "We end up competing with each other, and that would be a risk."
While generally opposed to Valley cityhood, downtown business leaders welcome a study that might improve city government and services to all areas, including those ripe for secession, Whitaker said. "City hall needs to have a real positive reaction," he said. "I hope that we can have a responsive government with the size that we have." The driving forces for cityhood always have been creating a sense of identity and local control, that people should deal with their own municipal problems rather than a government 25 miles away downtown, Scott said.
"That creates a lack of center because you really are beholden to a distant government," Scott said. "It's almost like being a colony." The Valley's mountainous divide from downtown and the rest of Los Angeles is more than symbolic.
The region long has been a hot spot for efforts to reduce the size and reach of government. For instance, Valley homeowners led the push for Proposition 13, the property tax control initiative that launched a nationwide movement.
Leading the way are business and homeowners groups acting as a kind of provisional government, as some political observers describe the groups. Cityhood notions caught fire in the mid-1970s when Valley business and political leaders formed the Committee Investigating Valley Independence City and County. They commissioned a study that found the Valley contributed 40 percent of the city's taxes and received only 15 percent of city services, said Scott, a CIVICC leader.
City officials criticized the study's accuracy, and state lawmakers killed cityhood. A measure pushed through the Legislature gave the City Council veto power over any secessionist cityhood proposal. The city lobby was formidable, recalled John Knox, a former Assemblyman from west Contra Costa County who authored many of the state's LAFCO laws. "I knew there were strong feelings, strong advocates for secession. But I didn't see the votes," he said. "The League of California Cities was pretty adamant. Councils protect their own turf."
The third cityhood movement flared after advocates for breaking up the Los Angeles Unified School District got a state law passed in 1995 that lowered the threshold of signatures needed to place a breakup measure on the ballot. The school board's veto power also was removed. Former Assemblywoman Paula Boland led that fight and followed with a measure in 1996 to remove the City Council's veto over cityhood. Valley VOTE was formed to generate support.
Scott recalled that Boland announced her measure at a meeting hosted by the United Chambers of Commerce of the San Fernando Valley, where Mayor Richard Riordan was a guest. "That was the first anyone got an inkling that cityhood was re-emerging," he said.
The Boland measure ultimately failed. But a year later Assembly members Robert Hertzberg, D-Van Nuys; and Tom McClintock, R-Granada Hills, who represent the Valley, got a law passed to remove the veto. The measure also created the dual majority requirement that voters both in the Valley and in the rest of the city must approve any cityhood proposal.
"It's a huge move. The fact that they've gotten this far with it would indicate they had a chance to succeed," Knox said. "They have a tough hill to climb, but it's legally possible and practically possible." With the legislative victory in hand, Valley VOTE changed its mission and in May 1998 began the petition drive for a cityhood study. Talk of secession could wait. "We had been accused of shooting from the hip," Scott said. "We all decided we wanted to be more careful and deliberative about the process."
Valley VOTE needed signatures from no less than 25 percent of the Valley's registered voters to get the study, a far tougher threshold than ballot measures face.
A small army of volunteers delivered boxes packed with some 202,000 signatures petitions to LAFCO during a public meeting in December. Three months later the county certified that Valley VOTE had more than the 131,771 valid signatures needed. In the process, more residents were left talking about the prospect of Valley cityhood.