Paying for LAFCO Study

As a person seriously interested in government reform, who campaigned in the 1960s for a North County Master Plan, in the 1970s for Canyon County Formation, in the 1980s as chairman of the Santa Clarita City Incorporation Committee, and in the 1990s as the mayor of Santa Clarita who pushed all the statewide organizations of cities to vote unanimously for fundamental reform of our state constitution, I am distressed with your editorial, “VOTE Should Pay Its Way,” Aug. 30.

I have long believed that LAFCO’s [the Local Agency Formation Commission’s] establishment of a fee for submitting petitions was an unconstitutional infringement of our right to petition. Now you advocate changing the rules in the middle of a campaign to make the petitioners pay for the study. One million dollars may sound like a lot of money, but it is little compared to the value of the possible improvements in government operations costing taxpayers billions per year.

All of the people of Los Angeles will benefit a great deal from a study of the effects of creation of a San Fernando Valley city. Many more citizens of Los Angeles are waiting to see what the impact will be, and those who remain in Los Angeles will enjoy greater attention to the problems in the basin as well as a greater voice in their local affairs.

Government in California has been stagnant. People naturally want government with which they can communicate easily, and from which they can get attention. The problem is that when Los Angeles was incorporated with a population of a couple of thousand people, no one considered the need to regularly update the way things were done. Let us invest the money in the study without quibbling.

After all, at least many of us learned in kindergarten not to change the rules in the middle of the game.

CARL BOYER

Santa Clarita