EDITORIAL HOORAY FOR HOLLYWOOD SECESSION LEADERS NOW FACE THEIR BIGGEST CHALLENGE.

CHALK one up for the little guy.

Residents of Hollywood, who have joined their San Fernando Valley neighbors in obtaining the right to self-determination, have already pulled off a coup. They've overcome the relentless obstruction of a city elite that's ruthless in its defense of the status quo.

With both Valley and Hollywood cityhood votes set to appear on the Nov. 5 ballot, Los Angeles' population could shrink by 40 percent and its land size by more than half.

The professional politicians, developers, contractors, unions, consultants and influence peddlers who make up City Hall's insider culture are prepared to do whatever it takes to crush secession.

That's why we've started to hear all the doomsday predictions from City Hall. To hear the insiders tell it, the end of the world is at hand.

And for them, it may well be. Their world as they know it, where tax dollars subsidize an opulent, selmportant existence, is in danger - for the first time ever.

Never before have the insiders' clout and power been insufficient to crush a popular movement in its earliest stages. Never before have they faced the real risk of losing it all. Never did they so much as dream that this day would arrive.

But the little guys - the average Hollywood and Valley residents who collected and signed petitions - have shocked the world. The reverberations have been felt far outside City Hall, with the secession stories drawing media attention as far away as England and India.

Credit belongs, in no small part, to the leadership that made it possible. In the Valley, Richard Close and Jeff Brain and the dozens of people active in Valley Voters Organized Toward Empowerment, had the vision to make a decades-old dream a reality. The same can be said for Valley VOTE's Hollywood counterpart, its founder, Fares Wehbe, and its president, Gene LaPietra.

Both Valley VOTE and Hollywood VOTE now face the burden of convincing Angelenos that, unlike the carping naysayers in City Hall, they have a real plan for a new kind of city in which neighborhoods matter and no one is taken for granted.

This is a great challenge. The public is rightly skeptical. People need to see how they would be better off. They need to be persuaded by future Valley and Hollywood leaders to think beyond the usual and day-to-day matters and to dream about what is possible in great cities.

The shared experience of Hollywood and the Valley in Los Angeles shows that when one community is cheated or neglected, the whole city suffers. Crime spills from neighborhood to neighborhood, apathy disenfranchises voters, public corruption goes unchecked.

For the leaders of both cityhood movements, the challenge is to convince the public that in the new cities, the mistakes of L.A. won't be repeated. The culture of 'me' will be transformed into the culture of 'us.'

It's not enough to point out what is wrong with L.A. Voters won't be swayed by the status quo neatly packaged in new wrappings. They need a real, palpable alternative.

If Valley and Hollywood secession leaders can give it to them, the little guy's biggest upset is yet to come.