A Break From L.A.
One secessionist says succinctly: Name another city that has a mountain range running through it. And geography is but one reason why the two-fifths of this city that sprawls north of the Santa Monica Mountains may try to do what 11 states attempted in the 1860s and 13 colonies did in 1776: declare independence.</br></br>Tom McClintock, a state assemblyman, is to the San Fernando Valley's secession what John Calhoun was to the South's -- the most trenchant theorist: "The ultimate check on an abusive or dysfunctional government is the ability of people to walk away from it." When McClintock was a high school student in White Plains, N.Y., he came home one day to find his mother in tears over her taxes. Thus was made a young conservative and a California family: "The ability to walk away from a dysfunctional government is what brought {my family} out here."</br></br>Now he is 41 and determined to midwife the birth of what would be the nation's sixth largest city. (Los Angeles would drop to third, behind New York and Chicago, and ahead of Houston and Philadelphia.) Sliced off of Los Angeles, the valley would be the nation's second most affluent city of more than one million. Today its per capita income is $19,021, second only to San Francisco's $19,695. In the rest of Los Angeles the figure is $14,668. The valley is 4 percent African American, 8 percent Asian American and has a large Latino population. Spanish is spoken in a quarter of all homes, and 38 percent of adults are foreign born.</br></br>Los Angeles, McClintock says, grew "like the old Soviet Union," by "gobbling up" contiguous communities, such as Hollywood and many others. It used its ownership of water rights to lure communities into an imperial city.</br></br>The result is a city of 467 square miles, large enough to hold St. Louis, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Boston and Pittsburgh, with room remaining for Manhattan. Another result, says McClintock, is a city where "local government is not local."