LOS ANGELES California is home these days to the most dismal politics in the land. The governor’s race pits an incumbent with a pitiful record, Democrat Gray Davis, against a sad sack Republican, Bill Simon. The state legislature is politically correct and liberal in the extreme and may accelerate the exodus of entrepreneurs to more pro-business states. Only one of 53 House contests is close to being competitive. The only Californian with a national political voice is Barbra Streisand. With the exception of actor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s emergence as a major player, there’s only one interesting political development in the state: the bid by the San Fernando Valley to secede from the city of Los Angeles. And it’s likely to lose. The secession issue has deep roots and possible national implications. The San Fernando Valley, with roughly one-third of L.A.’s population and divided from the rest of the city by the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains, has long fostered middle-class populist movements. It spawned Proposition 13, the tax-cutting referendum that passed in 1978 and touched off a national anti-tax drive. It was ground zero for anti-school busing activity that was attacked as racist in the 1970s but more recently has come to be viewed as legitimate and on the right side educationally. Now, the lesser grievances of the valley, which joined L.A. in 1915 to get water from the city’s aqueduct, have come to a head: chronically poor services, little return on taxes, lack of respect by an aloof political class, underrepresentation on the city council. These are grievances familiar in other cities as well, especially vast, unwieldy, and hard-to-govern places similar to L.A. Phoenix and Houston come to mind. So do San Antonio and Las Vegas and New York and Philadelphia and Jacksonville. But at the moment, the only notable secession campaigns outside L.A. are in West Seattle and Staten Island. And they’re not too serious. Should the secession referendum on the ballot in L.A. on November 5 pass–or should it even gain a majority of San Fernando Valley voters–it could have legs. All at once, secession efforts might spring up everywhere, as tax limitation drives did after Prop. 13 won. Naturally the ruling political class and its minions in every city would be arrayed against secessionists. That’s certainly true in L.A. Mayor James Hahn, ex-mayor Richard Riordan, the city council, unions, most black, white, and Latino political leaders, rich developers, the downtown business crowd, real estate interests, the Los Angeles Times–they’re all apoplectic about a valley breakaway and fully engaged in the fight against it. Says secession leader Richard Katz, “We’re up against every piece of the establishment, every bit of the status quo, everyone who has a piece of the action.” The anti-secessionists have raised more than $3 million, hired two of L.A.’s best political consultants (Kam Kuwata and Bill Carrick), put ads on TV, used scare tactics, and generally treated secession advocates as wackos. Wackos they aren’t, and they’ve got a strong case. Response times of police and paramedics are far longer in the valley. When the L.A. subway was built, only a single station was located in the valley. L.A. is so big that city hall is a 90-minute or more drive from some parts of the valley. After the earthquake in 1994, the L.A. government spent nearly $300 million renovating city hall, but took six years to repair the satellite city facility in Van Nuys in the heart of the valley. Meanwhile, Hahn and his crowd spend much of their time dreaming up new edifices for downtown, including an abortive plan to build a stadium to attract a National Football League team. Cultural facilities such as museums and large auditoriums sought by the valley? Forget it. And it’s now documented that the valley pays $128 million more in taxes each year than it gets back in services. Worse, however, is the lack of representation and the dissing. The city council has 15 members, one for every 246,000 Angelenos, and the districts have been gerrymandered over the years to minimize valley clout. Council members are distant figures. “Local government is supposed to be localized,” says Richard Close, president of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association and a leader in both Prop. 13 and secession. “This government is not local.” The large districts all but guarantee the election of hacks, insists Joel Kotkin, a journalist who teaches at Pepperdine University and lives in the valley. “You could call it Hacktown.” As for Hahn, he brings rich new definition to the word “bland.” Kotkin says he’s “a dumber version of Gray Davis.” If the valley seceded, it would have its own council with 14 members, one for every 94,000 people. Council members and a mayor’s contest are on the ballot, plus five potential names for a new city (Valley City, San Fernando Valley City, Rancho San Fernando, Mission Valley, Camelot). Close got Camelot on the ballot based on the idea of bringing the best people to government. The names have produced a fresh wave of derision aimed at valleyites, deepening their inferiority complex. “I’m the first to admit it,” says Close of feelings of inferiority. Among joke names suggested are Newer Jersey, offered by Jay Leno, and Porntopia, proposed because the X-rated movie industry is headquartered in the valley. Secession is not a new issue. It arose in the early 1970s, only to be thwarted by Mayor Tom Bradley. He got the legislature to pass a law requiring the L.A. city council to approve any secession. That meant that secession would never be possible. But in 1997, a Republican assemblywoman, Paula Boland, and a powerful Democrat, Bob Hertzberg, both valley residents, got the law repealed. And the secession movement, directed almost entirely by volunteers, was off and running. The next step was to bring the issue before the Local Agency Formation Commission, an appointive body with considerable power. Hahn and company tried to block this but failed. Then they sought to keep important city documents on revenues and expenditures out of LAFCO’s hands, but they failed at that too. Last April, LAFCO ruled that both the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood were viable as cities and put two secession issues on the ballot. The Hollywood measure has little prospect of winning, but the valley referendum is a different story. Last spring, an L.A. Times poll found that 49 percent of valley residents and 43percent of citywide residents favored valley secession. Hahn, who says secession would be “a disaster of Biblical proportions,” was shocked. And the result was a campaign of scare tactics. A valley city would abandon gay rights. It would be unable to respond to another earthquake. It wouldn’t have enough police and firefighters. It would never adopt rent control. That last charge is preposterous, says Jill Stewart, who covered secession for New Times (recently absorbed by another publication). “There hasn’t been a Southern California politician campaigning against rent control in probably 25 years,” she says. “But they’ll say everything’s in jeopardy. They’ll say the leash laws are.” The scare tactics have worked. Last week, a new L.A. Times survey found that only 42 percent in the valley back secession and 27 percent citywide. Both numbers matter because the election deck is stacked against secession. To win, it must be approved in both the valley and citywide. Realistically, the best hope of secessionists is that the valley will approve. With that in hand, they may file suit, arguing citywide approval is legally unnecessary. As a result, Hahn and his allies are pressing to prevent a valley majority for secession. If they succeed, it will be because secession is not a primal issue. It doesn’t involve money, as Prop. 13 did, or touch on schools and race, as the anti-busing movement did. At its core, it involves feeling good–and not defensive or disrespected–about where you live and making your community marginally better off. All that was enough to stir a populist campaign, but the past few years have not been kind to middle-class populism. Its day will come in L.A., but probably not in 2002. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
