Secession Trend a Natural Evolution

In the days when California was desperate for new residents and thousands of hopeful newcomers were crowding into this restless desert every year, there was a kind of mantra among those who took up the work of building cities: centralize.

The idea--popular here from the turn of the century until well after World War II, according to local historians--was that local communities stood to benefit if they joined together to create a larger city. Together, the reasoning ran, communities could have access to water and share the responsibilities of providing schools, cultural activities and other civic amenities.

How things have changed.

With a plan to divorce the Antelope Valley and Santa Clarita from Los Angeles County announced last week, there are now at least four efforts underway to break up parts of the city and county, and another four aimed at deconstructing the Los Angeles Unified School District.

The new county, which was proposed last week by state Sen. William “Pete” Knight (R-Palmdale), would have 800,000 people and consist of ex-urban communities where many residents wish to shed their identification with the megalopolis of Los Angeles. A group of politicians and activists in the San Fernando Valley says it doesn’t want to be associated with the big, dirty city either and has worked for more than two years to build a movement to secede from Los Angeles.

Similar activity has been bubbling in San Pedro and Venice. And before all of that started, parents in the Valley and other areas started pushing to break off from the city’s school district.

What is happening here?

According to Kevin Starr, a University of Southern California historian who is also California’s state librarian, these secession movements are part of a natural human desire for community--a desire that ironically is made more intense by the globalization of people’s lives brought on by technology from television to the Internet.

“If you live in a city that’s so big that whole sections don’t feel that they’re a part of it, you don’t have a sense of well-being,” said Starr. Nationwide, he said, there is a growing sense that we live or ought to live in a federation of local communities, governed not from the top down but rather in a sort of web from town to town.

So as communities develop their own identities, Starr said, they want their own names. They want their own mayors and supervisors.

“At the root of all these secession movements is the sincere belief that the interests of your little locality are not being listened to,” said C. Edward Dilks, an attorney who has represented a number of small cities, including Palmdale, and who serves as staff counsel to the elected charter commission. “There is a sense in the Antelope Valley that it is a rapidly growing community with its own defined set of needs and its own identity.”

“We have to fight all of L.A. County for services in the Antelope Valley,” complained Knight, a former mayor of Palmdale. “A few years ago, you could look at maps provided by Los Angeles County and the maps stopped at the hills. They didn’t even show north Los Angeles County.”

The high desert, he said, is different geographically and demographically from Los Angeles and would be better served united in a single county, along with other desert areas now served by Kern and San Bernardino counties.

In the San Fernando Valley, residents who back secession make similar arguments: that the region does not get enough services from the city to warrant its huge outlay of property and sales taxes; that the concerns of the rapidly changing Valley are not being addressed by a 15-member City Council whose majority is loyal to other regions.

And it’s not just happening in Southern California. A few years ago, Staten Island tried to secede from New York City. In Dade County, Florida, six municipalities are in the process of forming, to wrest control from a big, unresponsive county government.

Urban affairs experts, however, say that for reasons that seem unique to Southern California, the notion of secession is more palatable to people here than in, say, New York or Chicago.

The very fact that people pulled up roots to come here, these experts say, means that their ties to the place--or any place--are going to be somewhat weaker.

And that makes it easier to pull away.

“In communities like Boston or Chicago or New York, a culture has evolved for a long time in which there is a great deal of civic pride and a real sense of place and a sense of identity--a sense of uniqueness,” said City Councilman Mike Feuer, who represents West Los Angeles and parts of the San Fernando Valley. “In Los Angeles, because the evolution of the city has been so different from those East Coast cities--and because literally of the geography of Los Angeles--the ties of civic involvement are a little bit looser.”

To be sure, there is some question as to how much popular support secession ideas really have. The supporters in the Valley have said that money for their campaign is tight, and some regional leaders are calling for a poll to find out how much support the movement really has.

In the high desert, where talk of secession from Los Angeles and other counties has bloomed and faded in the past, it is too soon to tell how much support Knight’s idea will engender.

But while the secession movements in and of themselves may not succeed, the discontent that has produced them is real. One palpable example of its impact is the movement for reform of the Los Angeles city charter, which last year produced both an elected and an appointed reform commission.

“People want government closer to them,” said David Fleming, a San Fernando Valley attorney who pushed hard for charter reform and co-chairs an organization set up to study the question of secession. “Therefore, they want government broken up into smaller pieces.”

Fleming suggested that recent innovations in technology, such as the Internet and even talk radio have accustomed people to the idea that they can participate on an intimate level in the transfer of information and the development of ideas.

That, he said, has led to a desire to make governmental bodies small enough to be manipulated.

To a degree, this desire for smaller government represents little more than the swinging of a pendulum.

A hundred years ago, when the communities surrounding New York voted to join the city, and cities like Hollywood and Venice signed on with Los Angeles, the pervasive philosophy was that larger, more centralized governments were better, said William Fulton, author of “The Reluctant Metropolis,” a book about the development and future of Los Angeles.

“There was a belief in economies of scale,” Fulton said. “And there was a belief that you could have more honest government if it was bigger and more in the public eye.”

Now, residents of the very large cities that were formed at the turn of the last century are thinking hard about decentralizing for the next one.

One possible solution would be to meld the two approaches, strengthening community autonomy while also creating a strong enough regional government to handle issues that affect the entire area.

“Some government functions should be decentralized almost to the neighborhood level,” Fulton said. “But then, other government entities need to be broader--even regional.”

That way, planning and zoning decisions could be made at the local level, but services best centralized could be handled by the larger, regional government.

There is a long history, after all, to the notion of keeping individual communities small enough to be cohesive, even as they find strength and shared responsibility in a confederation.

“In ancient Greece, if standing in the . . . public square at the edge of the crowd you could not hear the orator speaking, it was time to create a new city,” said Starr. “In the course of American history, Kentucky broke away from Virginia, Maine was broken away from Massachusetts. We formed whole states out of other states when people felt that they belonged to something else.”