VOTES TO BREAK AWAY IN '70S ADDED CLOUT.

Byline: Amy Collins Daily News Staff Writer

When residents of the Santa Clarita Valley voted twice in the 1970s to secede from Los Angeles County, they were just looking for a little respect.

Connie Worden-Roberts remembers making the trek to downtown Los Angeles, only to have befuddled clerks search the maps and ask: ``Are you sure you're in L.A. County?''

Worden-Roberts co-chaired the drives to form Canyon County in 1976 and 1978, twin efforts to create a 400-square-mile, population-60,000 county encompassing the Santa Clarita Valley, Castaic, Gorman and Agua Dulce.

Area voters favored the split by a 60 percent margin, but the Los Angeles County electorate - who had the final say - quashed the measure twice at the ballot box.

The double-defeat did have some positive results, Worden-Roberts said.

``After an attempt to form a county, there was a lot more attention paid to our little community,'' she said. ``We got on the map.''

And more than that, county services started flowing north, according to Jo Anne Darcy, who is now a City Council member for Santa Clarita and the field director for county Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich.

``We supported breaking away from the county. We had a very nonresponsive supervisor. We (got response) after that,'' Darcy said.

Worden-Roberts speaks fondly of the camaraderie and can-do effort that spirited the move for local control. Volunteers operating on a small budget went door-to-door and into grocery stores to gather signatures for the petition drive.

``It was a fun time. It was a lot of togetherness. I call it the mouse that roared,'' Worden-Roberts said. ``For the first time . . . we all came together. There was a feeling that this was a possibility, that we could run our own local government.''

A report conducted on the feasibility of a breakup was both good news and bad news for Canyon County hopefuls. ``We would have been a wealthy, small county, but it would have been injurious to the county of Los Angeles to lose us,'' Worden-Roberts said of the study's findings.

Blazing opposition came from the county's firefighters union.

``The Fire Department became our single biggest opposition, and it was based on a misunderstanding,'' Worden-Roberts said. Fire officials from other counties were recommending cheaper ways of providing fire services, such as volunteer forces, and the L.A. firefighters thought their jobs were in danger, Worden-Roberts said.

The firefighters raised more than $250,000 to oppose the measures. ``Clearly they were instrumental in the defeat,'' Worden-Roberts said.

After the Canyon County plan failed the first time, state lawmakers moved to make it harder to break up for L.A. County, said Carl Boyer, who was active in the 1970s county separation movement and now serves on the Santa Clarita City Council.

He said that the legislation was adopted, but just a little too late to prevent a second election in 1978. The election was held, and Canyon County again failed.

Boyer has continued to work for a breakup of Los Angeles County, lobbying for statewide city organizations to back the proposal. Even before Assemblyman George Runner, R-Lancaster, this year proposed his bill to study the possibility of a breakup, Boyer had asked the issue be brought to the Santa Clarita City Council.

Boyer said that he would like to see the issues examined further, but that it's likely to be successful only if Santa Clarita has allies from around the county looking to chip off in multiple pieces.

``The solution is to split the county all at once,'' Boyer said.