Introduction: The Lay of the Land

To the traveler approaching Los Angeles by air from the east, especially at night, nearly all of Southern California west of the desert bordering the Colorado River looks like one gigantic city. For purposes of research and planning, however, this huge territory comprises five standard metropolitan statistical areas (SMSA's): 1) Anaheim-Santa Ana-Garden Grove in Orange County, 2) Los Angeles-Long Beach in Los Angeles County, 3) Oxnard-Ventura in Ventura County, 4) San Bernardino-Riverside-Ontario in San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, and 5) San Diego in San Diego County. (Los Angeles and Orange Counties were formerly regarded as constituting a single SMSA.)

Imperial County, in the extreme southeast corner of the state, is the only part of the region south of the San Gabriel Mountains not yet metropolitan in character. Recognizing the importance of regional planning it has, nevertheless, joined with Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Ventura Counties--together with 89 cities--in forming the Southern California Association of Governments, more commonly known as SCAG. (San Diego County is not a member.) Kern, Santa Barbara, and San Luis Obispo Counties are sometimes grouped with the seven already listed in a broader, tencounty definition of Southern California, but they are not involved in this study. It should, however, be noted that two of them have also attained SMSA status during the Sixties: Kern with Bakersfield as its central city and Santa Barbara with Santa Barbara.

Maze of local governments. --Nearly every SMSA presents the spectacle of a maze of official jurisdictions, not to mention scores of "communities" primarily social or economic in nature. Some idea of the complexity of the political map of the Los AngelesLong Beach area may be deduced from the numbers of each of the five main kinds of local units and agencies listed in Table 1. Altogether they number 495.

TABLE 1.--TYPES AND NUMBERS OF LOCAL GOVERNMENTAL UNITS IN THE
LOS ANGELES-LONG BEACH METROPOLITAN AREA: 1967-

Counties: Los Angeles, 7,044,711 population; 4,071 sq. mi.

1

School Districts:

Cities: Los Angeles, 2,806,669; Long Beach, 378,492; and 74 others
Elementary 40 High 11 Unified 38* Junior College 11

76

100

*Offering elementary, secondary and sometimes junior college courses.

Note: See References at end for sources used throughout the report.

To complete the picture, however, note must be taken of three other facts. 1) Some cities within the county have seen fit to create various kinds of municipal service districts. There are now 73 of these, the most common being for lighting, lighting maintenance, municipal improvements, vehicle parking and water. 2) Los Angeles County* also contains eighteen separate water districts, besides which it is itself one of the six counties in the vast Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. (In 1966-67 this super-special district levied, within the county, taxes totaling $25,003,866.) 3) In the interest of efficiency with regard to the extension of tax levies, all properties within the county are grouped into contiguous areas wherein the various combined rates (for county, city, school and special district purposes) are uniform. Each such area has its own tax code and currently Los Angeles County has 3,669 separate code areas.

Representative communities and school districts.--While the scheme used by the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations for the classification of communities proved useful in selecting representative communities of different types, no clear examples of three of the categories given could be found in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area, notwithstanding its size and variety. The City of Commerce is more nearly an industrial than a commercial enclave. Cerritos, which this past year changed its name from Dairy Valley, has a rural flavor today, but both the hopes and expectations of its wealthy landowners spell rapid urbanization. Finally, despite the immense amount of government work done within Los Angeles County, such is the spread of offices and facilities and such is the mobility of public employees and those who are employed under government contracts that no single community can be clearly identified as a government community. With these qualifications, most of the communities listed in Table 2 fit their classifications reasonably well.

One of the basic facts of life with regard to the government and politics of California concerns the public schools. Responsibility for education, which involves roughly half of all local public expenditures, is vested in school districts controlled by their own popularly-elected boards of trustees rather than in either counties or cities, the state's two general-purpose forms of local government. So deep and widespread is the conviction that education ought to be kept "out of politics" and separate from the rest of government, that the average citizen regards school districts as constituting a realm of their own. He thinks of local government not in terms of three categories--counties, cities and special districts--but four. School districts clearly fall within the legal definition of districts created for special purposes, but neither he nor any of his elected representatives conceive of them that way. They comprise a separate category all by themselves. Though this complicates the problem of locating fiscal disparities and gauging their seriousness, its solution would still be fairly easy (leaving aside the matter of all those other special districts) if school boundaries coincided with those of cities. The trouble is, however, that, except for two elementary districts (Hermosa Beach and Manhattan Beach), not a single one of the 100 school districts in the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area is coterminous with any incorporated municipality. Dozens of them contain parts of two or three cities and the Los Angeles Unified District includes--in addition to most, but not all, of municipal Los Angeles itself--all or parts of the following cities: Bell, Bell Gardens, Beverly Hills, Commerce, Cudahy, Culver City, El Segundo, Gardena, Hawthorne, Huntington Park, Inglewood, Lomita, Lynwood, Maywood, Montebello, Monterey Park, Rolling Hills Estates, San Fernando, Santa Monica, South Gate, Torrance, and Vernon. And as if this were not enough, it also includes several semi-rural areas simply called Road Districts Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5!

The explanation for this strange circumstance lies in the fact that, under California law, any smaller elementary or high school district voting for annexation to

*The term "Los Angeles County" is used interchangeably with "Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area" in its various forms.

a neighboring district of the same type must be accepted. Only unified districts have the option of declining a bid for consolidation and the Los Angeles Unified School District is barely five years old! Prior to 1962, Los Angeles was organized both as an elementary district and a high school district. This means that it could not control its own destiny insofar as territorial growth was concerned.

Bearing in mind that the central purpose of this inquiry is the detection and exposure of critical disparities among local communities, whether separate municipalities or otherwise, the analysis that follows attempts to link the examination of municipal finance with that of school districts and, where possible, with that of special districts and county government itself. But because of differences in their boundaries, this cannot be done with anything approaching precision.

Fiscal Disparities Among Local Communities

Local Government Finance:

Factors and Trends

City Revenues

Differences in per capita totals.--That "rich" and "poor" are classifications important for communities as well as families becomes apparent as soon as one begins to examine financial data pertaining to the various cities in the Los Angeles area. In terms of total revenue available per capita, the 19 different municipalities chosen for comparison varied in 1965-66 from a high of $12,970.22 in Vernon to a low of $34.82 in Baldwin Park. This kind of inequality, though dramatic, might not be very serious if the former had a large population and the latter a small one. But the trouble is that only some 228 people make their home in the industrial enclave of Vernon, whereas 45,000 live in the low-income bedroom community of Baldwin Park. See Table 3 noting estimates of population for June 30, 1966.

The main keys to this curious state of affairs lie in taxing and zoning and incorporation policies which will be examined in part II, but there is one other major factor which should perhaps be stressed here at the start. That is the enormous daily mobility of the people of Southern California. As a matter of fact, Vernon's daytime population probably numbers over 90,000. But almost all of them come from some other community and return there at night--in most cases by private motor car. Indeed, hundreds of "heads of households" in Baldwin Park may well be among these commuting factory workers.

Clearly more significant, however, are the differences between the per capita figures on total revenues for all 76 cities in the county and the corresponding figures for Los Angeles itself and some of the other larger cities. These were as follows in 1965-66: All cities, $105.61; all cities except the central city, $93.34; Los Angeles, $119.32; Long Beach, $180.19; Glendale, $93.88; Pasadena, $132.43; Beverly Hills, $232.61; Lakewood, $41.35; Pico Rivera, $37.68; Industry, $1,814.41; and Claremont, $74.09. See the table regarding the comparable figures for 1955-56.

Relative importance of different sources.--What is even more striking about these inequalities with respect to revenues is the wide variation to be found among the communities with regard to their use of different sources. Take the property tax: in 1965-66 Los Angeles got $43.02 per capita from this venerable source. Beverly Hills got $73.05; Lakewood got only $2.58; Pico Rivera, 9c; and Cerritos, 8¢; but Vernon, the factory city with almost no permanent residents, got $1,376.66. Note next the enormous variation in the yield of the sales or use tax. From the standpoint of fiscal disparities among California cities, this tax makes a greater difference than any other, particularly for the 31 communities that have incorporated since the initiation of the Lakewood or "Contract Cities" Plan in 1954 and especially the enactment of the BradleyBurns Law in 1956. Under this statute the state authorized each county to levy a