requirement go on general relief (GR), but the vast majority are handled by what in this state is called not old age assistance (OAA) but old age security (OAS).

The other major group of people "on welfare" are needy families with dependent children and even in prosperous Southern California their number is legion. The program which has been set up to meet their needs used to be called aid to needy children (ANC) or aid to dependent children (ADC). Some years ago, however, its name was changed to "aid to families with dependent children" (AFDC) and the case loads for this program serve as a valuable yardstick with reference to the financial strength of a community.

Unfortunately, from the standpoint of the purposes of this study, the county Bureau of Public Social Services keeps its records by administrative districts established for its own purposes rather than by incorporated communities. Since the Bureau uses only 20 districts for the whole of Los Angeles County including the central city, many of them include two or more cities--except those within Los Angeles itself. Given these circumstances, the best that can be done is to select a few districts which coincide with some substantial part of some of the communities selected for analysis in this report and show what their OAS and AFDC caseloads are. (The figures given are for May 1967.)

To ponder the implications of these figures even for a moment is to understand which are the more stable communities and which are the less. Glendale, Pasadena, Long Beach, West Los Angeles and Metro North with their relatively greater numbers of elderly people living on old age security are long settled and quite stable areas. But the Metro South and Southeast Districts within the City of Los Angeles with their high loadings of families, mainly Negro, needing aid for dependent children are anything but stable. Consequently there is always some degree of social unrest in these areas.

Within the El Monte District, which is one of great size geographically, there are both potentially trouble-laden cities like Baldwin Park as well as relatively serene little communities like Claremont. It is impossible to say anything about the district as a whole other than that it is mixed in character.

TABLE 13.--OAS AND AFDC CASE LOADS IN SELECTED DISTRICTS OF
LOS ANGELES COUNTY, MAY 1967

FACTORS AND FORCES AGGRAVATING OR LESSENING INTERGOVERNMENTAL DISPARITIES

Policies of California State Government

Under the Federal Constitution, the states have always been vested, not merely in theory but also in practice, with plenary power to organize local government within their boundaries. Legally, therefore, it is the State of California and specifically its successive Governors, Courts, and above all, its Legislatures who are to blame for whatever troublesome fiscal disparities there may be among representative communities and school districts in the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area. power to decide how all the functions of local government should be handled, it could have decided to handle all of them itself--which is what a few cynics suggest it will wind up having to do some day unless it provides the counties, cities, schools and special districts with the additional financial help they need to do their work properly.

For, having the

But only in the contemplation of law does a government ever begin de novo. When California was admitted to the Union, the American federal system was already 60 years old and many precedents had been established. One of the strongest of these was that, partly for greater convenience with regard to the administration of its own general policies but also as the basis for a system of local rural government, all the territory of the state should be divided into counties. Los Angeles was one of the original 27 counties established in 1849-50 and, when first formed, included most of Southern California between Santa Barbara and San Diego, an area of approximately 31,000 square miles. Thus if intervening generations had had the imagination to visualize coming developments and the wisdom to set up branch county offices instead of splitting off first one piece and then another to form new counties, this huge urban agglomeration would even now have a general-purpose unit of local government which it could use in coping with metropolitan problems. (There are, of course, a dozen reasons why they proceeded as they did--but it is interesting to speculate about the utility of such a huge county in this area today.)

Another precedent was that people living in a single neighborhood or locality and needing more services than the county could readily provide should be free to incorporate as a city through which they might, at their own expense, arrange for police, fire, street, sidewalk, water, sewer and lighting service under their own control.

A third precedent was that immediate responsibility for public education should be vested in small local school districts whose boundaries need have no relation with those of cities in the same area.

It was understood that all these types of units--rural, urban, and school-would be under the supervision of the state itself. Yet there was also considerable emphasis on local self-government, on the proposition that democracy begins at home, and this was full of meaning in a state with millions of acres of cheap land. So strong indeed was this sentiment that when, in 1879, California adopted its second (and present) constitution, it followed the lead taken by Missouri four years earlier and offered all cities having a population over 100,000 the privilege of home rule, namely the right to draft their own charters. Subsequently this was extended to all cities over 3,500.

Municipal Development

Time precludes anything like a systematic historical review of the evolution of state policies toward municipal development that have eased or exacerbated the problem of local fiscal disparities, but these are the main influences that have been at work.

Incorporation. --In the beginning, the Legislature often provided for the incorporation of cities by special legislation, but the evils occasionally accompanying

such action led to the inclusion in the Constitution of 1879 of a section stipulating that the Legislature should provide by general law, and only in that way, for the creation of cities. Since that time at least, the basic assumption has been that whenever a majority of voters in an unincorporated area containing a minimum of 500 inhabitants and following prescribed procedure indicate a desire to incorporate as a municipality, such an action will be in the public interest.

Those who take the initiative in circulating the necessary petition for an election and those who vote for incorporation may or may not be motivated by genuine community spirit. The crucial point is that the law seems to make a presumption to this effect. The members of the county board of supervisors, who must decide whether to grant or deny the petition, may inquire into the motives behind the effort to incorporate but, if all the procedural niceties have been observed, they invariably authorize the election.

The net of all this is that the process of incorporation in California has, until recently, tended to be much too loose. The state's failure to have formulated a clear, substantive definition of a city and its unrealistically low population requirements have permitted the incorporation of "communities" whose operations, as Crouch and Dinerman note in Southern California Metropolis, "in no way resemble those of a 'city' in the traditional, accepted sense of the term."167

Stanley Scott gives an even more astringent description of some of the travesties that have occurred: 17/

Cities have been incorporated which have more cows than people, and
for the purpose of protecting dairy farms against subdivision and
higher levels of municipal taxation. One city's thoroughfares are
privately owned (with) access under guard. Another city consists pri-
marily of cemeteries, has fewer than 300 (living) inhabitants, and de-
rives most of its revenues from burial fees. Certain cities were able
to meet the population requirement for incorporation only by counting
persons residing in motels or patients in sanataria.

Some cities are enclaves of extremely valuable industrial property,
whose chief function is the avoidance of taxation and other public
responsibilities. Other cities are enclaves of poverty, some having
as little as one-third (of) the state-wide average per capita assessed
valuation of municipalities.

Local Agency Formation Commissions.--Criticism of shoddy incorporations of the kind just described led in 1963 to the adoption of what, after four years, wears the appearance of a major reform. Declaring its purpose to be "the discouragement of urban sprawl and the encouragement of the orderly formation and development of local governmental agencies based on local conditions and circumstances," the Legislature ordered the establishment in each county of a Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), and charged it with controlling the proliferation of local governments in that county. No new city or special district can be established without LAFCO approval.

Each commission is composed of two county supervisors, two members chosen by city councilmen from among their number, and a fifth or public member chosen by the other four. Each commission normally meets once a month and reviews all applications for the formation of new cities or special districts. Collectively they ruled on 5,000 applications during their first three years (1963-66) and the California Intergovernmental Council on Urban Growth reported in 1966 that, by and large, they were finding their role and working constructively, referring many proposals to the county planning commission for advice before taking action, likewise conferring when appropriate with LAFCO's adjoining counties. As an indication of what these commissions have accomplished by way of slowing down the incorporation of new cities, not one single new

municipality was created in California between August 1, 1966 and July 1, 1967--an unprecedented record for the period since World War II.

Annexation. --The only case in which a city may openly initiate proceedings for the annexation of a piece of territory is that of a piece of uninhabited territory, an area adjacent to a city and having less than twelve registered voters. Otherwise the initiative must be taken by not less than one-fourth of the owners of the land proposed for annexation. Should owners representing half the value of the land file written protests, the effort fails. Otherwise the council may annex the property by ordinance. Much of the municipal expansion which has occurred in Southern California since World War II has been through annexation of such uninhabited territory, a good deal of it as the result of quiet negotiations between land developers and city councils.

Consolidation.--Up to 1909, California had no procedure whereby one already established city might consolidate with another. At that time, however, Los Angeles City became keenly interested in having as many as possible of the neighboring suburbs merge their lot with hers. Two considerations were dominant. In the first place, the leaders of the central city knew that it could never win a big place in the sun unless through a large stretch of "strip annexation" and consolidation with Wilmington and San Pedro it could acquire a big seaport. In the second place they realized that, depending on how quickly and fully they exploited the vast enlargement of their water supply via the Owens Valley aqueduct destined for completion in 1913, that costly venture could either turn out to be a good investment or come a cropper.

Working with the Legislature they secured in 1909 the enactment of a statute making consolidation possible when approved by the voters of both cities involved. This accomplished, the city proceeded with its plans and, over the next 23 years, ten suburbs consolidated with Los Angeles. (There have been none since 1932.)

Special district formation.--California has been alert for half a century or more to the potentialities for easing, if not solving, metropolitan problems through the device of creating special districts of various kinds--single purpose and multipurpose; county-wise, intra-county or multi-county; governed by their own boards or governed by other officers, e.g., boards of supervisors, serving ex officio; created by the Legislature itself, created by county boards of supervisors under explicit authorization from the Legislature, or created by the people themselves acting in accordance with a general statute.

The newest special district, and one of enormous potential significance in connection with services affected by fiscal disparities is the Southern California Rapid Transit District (RTD), created by the Legislature as the counterpart in this region of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in the San Francisco-Oakland SMSA. All it is doing now is operating the buses taken over from the former Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) which provide the only public transportation available within the City of Los Angeles and likewise the cheapest and most frequent bus service between the central city and the key cities in the neighboring counties of Riverside and San Bernardino. But it is making intensive cost and engineering studies looking to the construction over the next eight-ten years of a system of mass rapid transit connecting all the more densely settled parts of the area.

Interlocal contracting.--Intergovernmental contracts on the local level have a long and voluminous history in California, the state having recognized the need for