EMOTIONAL WOUNDS VALLEYITES HAVE LONG SUFFERED DISREGARD.

Byline: Lisa Mascaro Staff Writer

The great divide in the city of Los Angeles right now isn't Mulholland Drive, but rather the hearts and minds of its populace polarized over the secession struggle.

Secession efforts in the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood have opened the city's deepest emotional resentments and challenged the basic rules of the city's governance in a public soul-searching unprecedented in its history.

``I think this whole thing is pretty much a primal scream by the Valley, which, after all, is separate and apart from the rest of Los Angeles geographically, because for years the Valley has not been given attention by downtown,'' said the Valley's leading secession backer, attorney David Fleming.

``People in the Valley have had it in terms of inferior services. This has been building for 30 years. This didn't happen overnight.''

The response from Mayor James Hahn, and those fighting to keep the city intact, has been every bit as visceral.

The campaign's mood swings from fearmongering in TV ads that portray secession as an irresponsible roll of the dice to love notes on yard signs that read, ``We Love L.A.''

Hahn last week in a rare interview with the Daily News spoke emotionally about his frustrations with the secessionists, and how he sees it tearing at the city and diverting government from what he sees as its provision of services to all neighborhoods.

``We're all working hard at City Hall, in every neighborhood,'' Hahn said, in what seemed the closest he's come yet to a plea for understanding, before he went on angrily to say that the secessionists' constant drumbeat of criticism is ``an insult to all city employees who work real hard to do a good job with limited resources.''

``It's very frustrating to me, it's illogical, it makes no sense,'' Hahn said, likening the interview on secession to having ``molars drilled'' by a dentist without Novocain.

The depth of the animosity is underscored in that neither side's leadership has budged from its rhetoric, pulled back from the attack or tried even for a while to walk in the other guy's shoes.

Secessionists say the mad-as-hell, we're not-going-to-take-it-anymore attitude is fueled by downtown's refusal to meet the needs of the neighborhoods throughout most of the city.

``Where did that leave us? That left us with no other place to go, except to say this city doesn't work. The Valley doesn't get its share. Nobody pays attention to us. We're a minority - a permanent minority,'' said Fleming. ``That's really the way it is.''

Promises like those Hahn is making in a $5 million, high-power anti-secession campaign to make a better L.A. through advisory neighborhood councils, term limits and a new police chief ring hollow, they say. Anti- secessionists, meanwhile, accuse the secessionists of being ``100 percent negative.''

``I think we all could've done a better job,'' said former Mayor Richard Riordan, adding his voice to the tepid mea culpas now common among city leaders, who then quickly add that staying together is the only answer.

``From my point of view, it's a disaster to have the Valley divorce itself from L.A.; (the Valley) has been so good to Los Angeles, and the city's been good to the Valley.''

Deputy Mayor Matt Middlebrook insists the mayor has heard secessionists' frustration. ``The city has responded to a great deal of those concerns. We rewrote our City Charter. Neighborhood councils have been created. We have area planning commissions that have brought government to a more-local level.

``The issues that have been raised - that government needs to be brought down to a more-local level - Jim Hahn has done that,'' Middlebrook said.

``There's a tremendous amount of empathy ... I don't think you'd ever hear the mayor say, 'We're doing the best we can.' Work with us. Join us in trying to solve these issues.''

Clash of cultures

Tom Hogen-Esch, an assistant professor of political science at California State University, Northridge, who has studied the issues extensively, says secession has a great deal to do with fundamental cultural wars.

``You have this clash of two deeply-rooted American values. One, emphasizing local control - neighborhood government, populism - coming into conflict with another deeply-rooted value in American politics, which is working things out together, in a democracy,'' he said.

``Secession is a real threat to any democracy ... because it essentially says political conflict cannot be resolved in the existing institution. ... The institution of democracy fails. It's a very dangerous thing to admit.''

For secessionists, the quest for self-determination comes after decades of trying - and failing - to get for the Valley its fair share of attention, service and respect from City Hall.

``It was more the accumulation, watching dollars go to other places, grants go to other places, transportation dollars ... there'd been a history,'' said Richard Katz, the former state assemblyman who chairs the leading secession group, the San Fernando Valley Independence Committee.

He said the new City Charter ``failed to live up to expectations,'' referring to Riordan and Fleming starting the reform movement with the goal of empowering neighborhoods but getting only advisory councils.

``There were a lot of grand promises made about how the Valley would do better. ... It was so much fluff - the promised reform turned out to be charter reform light,'' Katz said.

Bob Scott, a longtime Valley activist from the Proposition 13 days of the 1970s who was removed by Hahn earlier this year from his seat on the powerful Planning Commission, said it was a `'slow burn'' that led to today's boil-over.

``In those days, I guess we weren't quite as passionate as we are now - because resistance makes you more passionate,'' said Scott. ``When you see the evil it energizes you. It's all about power and wielding the power others have earned ... and wanting to use it to your personal benefit to the detriment of your citizens.

``That's the thing that wakes me up in the middle of the night - that they could be so malevolent, that you could declare war on your own people ... that the city of Los Angeles could actually be at war with the people of the San Fernando Valley.''

To the mayor, secession fever is ``100 percent negative'' criticism that disregards all the work being done in City Hall.

``There's a lot of conventional wisdom that the only people who have passion in the issue are the pro-secessionists in the San Fernando Valley,'' said Hahn's chief anti-secession strategist, Kam Kuwata. ``When you spend lot of time in the Valley, and around the city of Los Angeles, (you see people) who are passionate about keeping this city together.''

Adding fuel to fire

Last week, Hahn added fuel to the fire by saying he wants a state law barring new cityhood efforts for a ``reasonable'' amount of time if it fails Nov. 5. Middlebrook said the mayor's intent is not to quash debate, but to stop having to spend city resources on the issue.

City Councilman Alex Padilla, a native son of the Northeast Valley who now represents his community, said the problems shouldn't break up a municipality that is watched the world over as a test case for addressing the challenges of a large, old, diverse city.

``I'll be honest with you, some of the emotions I actually share. Growing up in the San Fernando Valley, especially growing older, I saw the inequities. Here's where my emotion comes in - that's why I ran for office. I want to do something about it.''

Specific plan needed

He said that without a solid, specific plan from secessionists about how they would run things differently, secession is no answer.

``I do give the folks driving secession a lot of credit, not only for getting to this stage in the process, everybody has to recognize the issues being raised have been thanks, in part, to secession,'' he said.

``Is City Hall listening much more to the Valley than it has in the past? Yes. Then it's all going to go away after the election? That's absolutely not true. I'm not going anywhere. I'm still going to be councilman.

``It's very emotional because the implications of secession strike to the most fundamental elements of our life - our quality of life, what kind of environment are we making for our families and our children. We should embrace that challenge. This is a defining moment for the city; again it can be a defining moment for the country.''

Plenty at stake

Those watching the debate know there is plenty at stake - few elected officials would want to be in office the day the nation's second-largest city broke in two.

But few admit to being bothered that the once-ragtag group of secessionists has come so far in its efforts to split up Los Angeles or that the underdog issue is stealing the limelight over other city issues of the day.

``The frustration comes from not being able to focus on other issues,'' Middlebrook said.

Fleming put it this way: ``They laughed at it at first. ... Now they're scared. Now we've got their attention, we'll see what happens.''

Unlike the great civic debates of days past that equally promised an extreme change in the landscape - Proposition 13 or school busing, for example - the emotions behind secession have not grabbed voters the same way.

Breaking up the city is not directly about your home or your kids, the way those issues were, but could bring as much drastic change as the previous issues.

Kuwata points to the possibility of higher water bills or closed-down after-school programs that could come for Valley residents if the new city's budget doesn't pan out as planned.

Secessionists say their fight is for freedom - they compare the mayor to the king of England during the Revolutionary War, and say the downtown powermongers rule City Hall.

But voters have a hard time wading through the dollars and cents of running a new city, and are left to fill the gaps with slogans and sound bites from TV ads.

``The question of secession is so mind-blowingly complex and the culture of civic participation and knowledge about local government is so thin,'' said Hogen-Esch, ``that when you combine that level of complexity with a very unsophisticated understanding of local government and the issues involved, that's going to translate into what Homer Simpson says: Boring.''