South County Option : Board Backs Step for Cityhood Study

The feasibility of turning unincorporated areas of south Orange County into cities providing their own public services will be studied if the Board of Supervisors approves a research plan, county officials said Tuesday.

The supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to have the county administrative office draw up a “scope of work” for the incorporation study, the first step toward authorizing the study.

The document, due in two weeks, may lead to the hiring of a consulting firm to conduct the actual research, officials said.

Incorporation is a sensitive issue among south county residents, who were recently notified that the county no longer intends to help finance their special, locally administered districts. The districts provide a wide variety of services that differ somewhat from one community to the next. Typical of the services involved is street sweeping.

Tuesday’s action was requested by Supervisor Bruce Nestande, whose district includes Mission Viejo and a large portion of the unincorporated (county) territory in the eastern foothills and Saddleback Valley area of south Orange County.

Although he joined in the unanimous vote, Board Chairman Thomas F. Riley warned, during Tuesday’s board session, that a feasibility study would “open a Pandora’s box,” involving unincorporated islands and communities such as Rossmoor, near Los Alamitos, which may also want county-financed incorporation studies.

But Nestande told the board it was “impossible” to know what should be done about paying for public works and public services in south Orange County without an incorporation study.

Letter to Colleagues

“I cannot intelligently respond to the issue of incorporation without some data,” Nestande said. “Incorporation is one of the options for the people down there.”

In a letter to his colleagues, Nestande said the board had properly refused residents’ previous requests for such studies, on the theory that “the existing system works, why change it?”

However, the letter continued, “The Board of Supervisors has now changed the ‘ballgame’ regarding financing of local services.”

Nestande was referring to the board’s decision, last Feb. 13, to inform residents of Mission Viejo and other unincorporated communities that it would no longer provide so-called augmentation funds to special service districts that take care of jobs such as street sweeping and street lighting maintenance.

The augmentation fund is a pool of countywide property tax revenues from which the districts make up the difference between their budgets and what they receive directly from property taxes assessed within their own boundaries.

The special districts are organized into 14 county service areas.

The board’s February decision was based on arguments such as, for example, Buena Park taxpayers should not be subsidizing the cost of trimming grass on a baseball diamond in Laguna Hills because they may never see or use the field.

In recent years, Leisure World, Mission Viejo and Laguna Hills all have either studied incorporation or attempted to incorporate without success.

Nestande Claims Neutrality

Nestande said Tuesday that he was not acting on behalf of any group that favors incorporation, and is not convinced himself that incorporation would be the best solution.

Nestande said last February, however, that he supported beginning “some incorporation efforts down there” in the south county. The unincorporated communities have already been notified that their options are to reduce services, establish benefit assessments or consolidate community-service areas into one large unit to minimize costs.