Nearly 130 East Los Angeles residents, business owners, and leaders filled East Los Tacos on Friday morning to learn about a proposed bill that would establish a task force to explore the possibilities of East L.A. becoming its own city or special district.
Efforts to incorporate East L.A. into a city have failed in the past, with one of the latest attempts failing in 2012 when the Local Agency Formation Commission for the County of Los Angeles found that the unincorporated area would not be able to financially sustain itself as a city.
At the forum, Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo stressed that the bill, which she recently unveiled, would not immediately mandate cityhood. Rather, it would simply study how tax dollars in East L.A. are being used. It would also explore the future of the region’s tax base and economic development.
East L.A., with a population of nearly 120,000 people, should have more county representation, Carrillo said.
“We want to see a better East L.A. We want to see better representation. We want to work better with our county partners. We want to make sure that if we put in a request for a business license on Whittier Boulevard that you have appropriate response,” she said, adding that it’s not a poor indication of the county. “It’s just the bureaucracy of the county.”
“I no longer want to hear what’s not feasible, I want to hear what’s possible,” she said.
Carrillo said East L.A. lacks a governing board that can more quickly respond to community needs and that can develop homegrown policies and programs to make the region more financially feasible as a city or special district in the future.
“If we had a special district, we would have representatives at the local level involved with infrastructure development, with new housing, new projects, economic development, workplace development to better improve the lives of people who live here today,” she said.
Special districts are local governments created by the people of a community to deliver essential services, such as the designated district of Rossmoor in Orange County, that handles services like street lighting, tree maintenance, and street sweeping.
County Supervisor Hilda Solis, who has represented the region for nearly a decade, said in a statement that incorporation would hurt residents who receive county support and funding for law enforcement, fire services, libraries and housing. Solis did not attend the forum, but county representatives were there to answer questions.
“A false narrative has been established by the bill’s author implying that East Los Angeles is without local representation and that incorporation would benefit residents, and that is simply not the case. By steadfastly opposing AB 2986, we demonstrate our unwavering dedication to preserving this culturally vibrant community,” Solis said in a statement on Wednesday.
Maria Silvia Corona, who attended the forum, has lived in East L.A. for 50 years and said that a sole county representative for her entire hometown isn’t enough.
“I know Hilda can help us, but when you make a complaint, there’s not a special group who can help this community,” said Corona, 66, who held a sign in alliance with the proposed bill.
Several others at the event drew comparisons between East L.A. and neighboring cities, that despite having smaller populations, are locally represented by elected leaders, such as Commerce, Maywood and Cudahy – all cities with less than 25,000 people.
Tony DeMarco, president of the Whittier Boulevard Merchant Association, was at the event and said that the iconic thoroughfare hasn’t experienced much economic redevelopment. He felt the county wasn’t equipped to support small businesses in the same way as cities with localized, governmental bodies.
“The problem is the bureaucracy …,” he said.
Still, Solis said in a statement the bill places special interests ahead of community needs and that the county doesn’t have the money for the proposed study. Carrillo, however, is confident the state could foot the bill.
The county board of supervisors, in a unanimous vote, passed a motion on Tuesday opposing the proposed bill, offering, instead, a county-led study over the course of four months. Carrillo questioned if it was a sufficient amount of time to get an accurate financial study for the community.
To Carrillo, the community would benefit from the study, even if it showed cityhood was not a possibility. It would offer a better idea of how much L.A. county spends on services across East L.A., she said.
“I hope that people understand the intention of the bill and there’s clarification to all of the misunderstandings of the bill. This is not about cutting services from the county… This is what the residents want. They want a local voice and they have felt that they don’t have that,” Carrillo said.
If the study showed that cityhood or special district classification was viable, incorporation would follow signature gathering, analyzing financial aspects, and wide public approval, according to Carrillo. If incorporated into a city, East L.A. would be the tenth largest in L.A. county.
East LA and Boyle Heights should both be either their own cities, or be one big city with proper services and their own localized bureaucracies to provide sufficient efficient city services. Hilda and the other supervisors could help supplement these two cities needs. This could be done by redistributing some of the money the county collects in property taxes. I know Boyle Heights isn’t even apart of this but my personal opinion it should also be its own city. Because the cop outs we get from our CD14 offices is that LA is too big to properly service us. So then let’s incorporate to our own city charters.