Split Decision on Area Codes Has an Overlay of Victory

They weren’t exactly dancing in the streets in Santa Monica on Tuesday. It rained and nobody did much of anything in the streets but get wet.

There was nonetheless some degree of satisfaction with the recommendation Monday that the state Public Utilities Commission split the 310 telephone area along Imperial Highway and Interstate 105.

The split represents a victory of sorts for the people who led the opposition to the PUC’s plan two years ago to lay a new area code--overlay it, as they say--atop the old 310.

The split now proposed by the PUC staff would leave the communities north of the highway, those that led the opposition to the overlay, in the 310 code. That includes West Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Malibu and most of Inglewood.

All or most of the following South Bay communities would be assigned to the new 424 area code: Santa Catalina Island, San Pedro, Wilmington, Carson, Lomita, the Palos Verdes Peninsula, Harbor City, Torrance, Redondo Beach, Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, El Segundo, Lawndale, Gardena, Compton, the Harbor Gateway area, Hawthorne and Lynwood.

Steve Teitelbaum, a Santa Monica plastic surgeon who helped lead the revolt two years ago against any change, greeted the news as a partial victory.

“There is some degree of NIMBYism to the whole thing,” Teitelbaum said. “The way they did this, with the split, we escaped.”

He recognizes that not everybody will be happy with the outcome, particularly those in the South Bay whose relief turned out to be only temporary.

There’s some justice in this, though, he said.

“It was a bunch of yuppies on the Westside that did this. There was a certain indignity, an arrogance I had about this, in fighting it. The South Bay didn’t really care.”

The South Bay may care more now, but the news of the split was still filtering through. The local chambers of commerce were among the staunchest opponents of splitting the area code two years ago. They complained about costs their members would incur to print new stationery and directories.

As of Tuesday, they hadn’t yet had time to take up arms against the new plan.

Kyle Devine, a spokeswoman for the PUC, said new methods of allocating telephone numbers had been successful in delaying the need for new area codes, but now “we’re at a point when we’re getting so low on numbers, there’s just not enough to last.”

Telephone numbers are assigned by prefixes, and there are 792 prefixes available within each area code, approximately 8 million phone numbers. In the beginning, in Southern California, there was just 213, which over time became two, then three and four new codes. It took almost 50 years for the original three area codes of the entire state to grow to 13.

All things considered, it was a relatively stable, even stately, progression.

Kathleen Garrett of Santa Monica regards her 310 area code as an old and faithful friend.

She has had the same phone number, area code included, since 1983, longer than she has had most anything else. Much longer, for instance, than she has had her current hair color.

Or the color before that, or before that, or that, or--well, you get the picture.

Most people understand that change is a permanent feature of contemporary life. Things come and go: Cars, friends, jobs, relationships, the Soviet Union. Area codes, on the other hand, are supposed to stay the same.

For the longest time, this was the way of the world.

Then in the late 1990s, new area codes spilled forth in merry profusion, like clowns from a circus cannon. The lonesome 213 was joined by 310, 323, 562, 619, 626, 661, 714, 805, 818, 805, 858, 909 and 949.

Fed by a boom in computers, fax machines, cell phones and pagers, the original three area codes of California became 25 and counting.

The PUC has enough unused prefixes in the 310 area to last, at current rates, only until next January, Devine said.

The decision to leave the Westside rather than the South Bay with the old area code was made in part because the commission wanted to spare Los Angeles International Airport the hassle of changing, she said. LAX remains in the 310 area. There was no way of putting LAX and the South Bay together and balancing the populations of the two areas.

So the South Bay lost and the Westside won.