Bi-County Task Force Considers Idea of Secession : Boundaries: Residents near the Los Angeles and Ventura counties’ border say neither is paying enough attention to their communities’ needs.

Saying they live in a political outback, ignored by the power centers of both Los Angeles and Ventura counties, a group of 60 unlikely revolutionaries from the area between Thousand Oaks and Calabasas met this week to consider seceding from both counties and forming their own, to be called “Chumash County” or “Conejo County.”

“We want to control our own local destinies and not be subject to the whims of a remote bureaucracy,” said Jim Henderson, a Westlake Village resident who serves on a bi-county task force studying the idea of secession.

He described an exchange he once had with a Los Angeles County official complaining about overgrown weeds: “ ‘Oh, Westlake Village. That’s near Castaic, isn’t it?’ ” the official responded, misplacing the community in northern Los Angeles County. “I hear the same comments from people across the line” in Ventura County, Henderson said.

Thousand Oaks resident Nancy Grasmehr said, “There’s a perception that neither L.A. nor Ventura County is meeting the needs of people in this area.”

And Westlake Village Councilwoman Berniece Bennett pointed out that this string of wealthy communities in the Conejo and Las Virgenes valleys sends more property tax revenue to county governments than they get back in services.

The meeting Thursday night was sponsored by the Conejo Future Foundation, a Thousand Oaks research group that is assembling a report on the pros and cons of forming a third county. The report is scheduled to be completed in June.

Forming a new county was only one of eight options presented Thursday--all of them aimed at sharpening local governments’ focus on the needs of the 176,000 residents of Calabasas, Hidden Hills, Agoura Hills and Westlake Village in Los Angeles County, and Oak Park and Thousand Oaks in Ventura County.

Some proposals would move the county line east or west, so that the corridor of residents from Calabasas to Thousand Oaks is bunched in one county. Others would use existing agencies, such as the Southern California Assn. of Governments and the Local Agency Formation commissions, to make county government offices more attentive.

Group leaders from both counties are trying to act now, for fear that the state Legislature may further dilute their influence over county governments by creating regional planning agencies throughout the state.

A bill by Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco), would lump Ventura County into a regional government with Los Angeles, Orange and other counties in Southern California.

Residents on both sides of the county line have pursued the dream of forming a new county since the concept of Conejo County was first studied by the Conejo Valley Chamber of Commerce in 1983.

But Stanley A. Eisner, executive director of the Ventura County Local Agency Formation Commission, has said that given the political problems it would face, a new county is unlikely and the idea would probably not get very far in Los Angeles or Ventura.

Eisner was not invited to attend Thursday night’s meeting.

Carolyn Kopp, executive director of the Conejo Future Foundation, acknowledged that creating a new county involves many hurdles. But, she said, it is not as improbable as it appears.