Petitions Are Submitted, but No Check for Check

With great ceremony, but no money, activists pushing for a study on divorcing the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles turned in more than 200,000 signatures Wednesday, leading the agency that oversees the secession process to ask the county for financial help.

Valley VOTE, the group leading the movement to break off more than a third of the city, presented 22 boxes of petitions to the Local Agency Formation Commission in hopes of kicking off a study and possible vote on Valley secession.

But as promised, the secession activists brought no check for the fee normally charged by LAFCO to check signatures, calling it an unconstitutional hurdle blocking their right to petition the government for grievances. They vowed to take their objections to court if necessary.

“To charge the people amounts to a poll tax,” said Valley VOTE President Jeff Brain. “It is a violation of the 14th Amendment.”

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the nine-member LAFCO panel, agreed with secession activists, saying such a signature fee--which could run as high as $270,000--bars all but the rich from placing measures on the ballot.

With unanimous support from his LAFCO colleagues, he vowed to ask the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday to waive the fee, but conceded he may not have the support to succeed.

“If we don’t have the votes to do that,” Yaroslavsky said, “I think the petitioners would challenge our process [in court], which frankly, I would invite them to do.”

Valley VOTE needs roughly 132,000 signatures--or one-fourth of the Valley’s registered voters--to spur a secession study. If the study finds Valley secession is economically feasible, county leaders could place the issue on the ballot as early as 2000.

After learning LAFCO would not allow the county registrar-recorder to count the signatures until the financial issue was resolved, Valley VOTE leaders briefly pondered taking the petition boxes back.

The reason: Once signatures are turned in, county lawyers said, they must be checked within 30 days or otherwise run the risk of being declared invalid in court. Because county leaders could take at least a week to decide the issue, and there are so many signatures to check, election officials may now have trouble meeting that deadline.

“It seems there are insurmountable hurdles being thrown in front of the petition drive,” said Valley VOTE Chairman Richard Close, a LAFCO alternate.

Councilman Hal Bernson, who represents the city on LAFCO, said he too considered the fee unfair. But because LAFCO--which usually handles annexations--does not have the budget to assume the verification costs, it has no choice but to forward the matter to the county, which funds LAFCO along with the city, or leave it to the courts, he said.

“There’s no way we have the means to deal with all the complications in this particular case,” Bernson said. “Someone else is going to have to sort this all out, and I think it’s going to be a judge.”

Supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite Burke warned her LAFCO colleagues that the Valley secession movement was one of several similar drives underway in the city--and that the others would surely expect not to pay if Valley VOTE was given a break.

Activists in San Pedro-Wilmington, Eagle Rock, and most recently, Westchester-Playa del Rey, have launched secession drives.

“I suspect this is the first of many, many secessions that we will see,” she said. “I personally believe the court is the place to take this.”