Top Administrator Envisions Santa Clarita as a 21st-Century City

Nearly six years ago, four communities banded together to incorporate the city of Santa Clarita, just over the Santa Susana Mountains from Los Angeles, with visions of paving a new path in urban planning and building a 21st-Century municipality. City Manager George Caravalho, 53, has been the administrative head of the city since June, 1988, seven months after the city was born. He spoke with staff writer Jonathan Gaw.

Question: There was talk about this being a great opportunity to develop a 21st-Century city. What is a 21st-Century city, and is that a new idea?

Answer: The whole idea was to say that most cities in the United States were created in an industrial society and many of those cities were created around crossroads and created around ports. They had some reason for existence. You didn’t have a city that was a planned city.

When you looked at Santa Clarita, you had a chance here because of its distinct separateness from Los Angeles to create a community roughly several hundred thousand in population and probably well over a hundred square miles and do a good job in the sense of economically making itself sustaining.

Being at the crossroads of Highway 126 going east-west and Interstate 5 going north-south, having a variety of housing, having major entertainment, major employment, having the kind of topographical characteristics we have here with lots of canyons, a greenbelt and national forest surrounding the city, an enlightened population, all of these things point toward really having an opportunity to create this city.

We were also talking about reversing the dependency on the automobile and creating a city that would have substantial numbers of pedestrians, bikeways, trolleys and those kinds of things.

*

Q. As Santa Clarita grows, why do you believe Santa Clarita can avoid the problems, such as gangs and crime, that many of the cities before you have not been able to avoid?

A. First, we have a commitment to those programs aimed at children, such as youth camps, self-esteem programs and after-school programs. Secondly, we have many young families that believe in and are committed to these kinds of programs.

Thirdly, we charge fees, and since their income is above average, the people pay the fees. Of our total recreation program, over 50% is paid by fees from users. You couldn’t do that in South-Central Los Angeles. People just can’t afford it.

We have to ask ourselves, “Do you pay me now or do you pay me later?” For 20 years that I’ve been in the business, we have put more money in law enforcement, more money in prisons, substantial money in prisons, and we have doubled the prison population. And we have more fear. When are we going to say, “Hey, we have to reverse that, we got to put more money in the front end in the hope that we’ll have less in the legal system, less contacts with law enforcement and less people in prisons.”

*

Q. In some aspects of the city will you have an imbalance--of, say, low-income housing? Is this going to be a problem as the city grows?

A. Yes, unless we affirmatively recognize that and have a distribution of a variety of housing throughout the community, you can have an impaction. In east Newhall, there’s a fair amount of poverty and substandard housing, but by some standards not all that bad. But I think that as we develop as a community and bring in the types of housing that are built by Dale Poe Development Corp. and Newhall Land and Farming Co., and as long as we continue to have a variety of housing in those neighborhoods for different groups, then you won’t have an impacted area.

*

Q. How can we get a variety of housing spread throughout the city?

A. Just insist on it. When we approve the tracts, insist that they have a mixture of housing. The City Council’s policy is to distribute that housing, not to build a complex for, say, low-income families, because then the whole complex becomes impacted, but to have them interspersed among various units. Our planning staff tries to find opportunities to get developers to do that.

What you are going to see is around the mall a lot of affordable housing. You’re going to see higher densities: townhouses, condos and some apartments.

The idea is to have a higher-density area down here in the middle of town and encourage more pedestrian orientations. Around the train station is another area where we are talking about having a community that will be less dependent on the automobile.

*

Q. To have a truly complete city, you need to have some of the dirtier manufacturing that cities would rather not have near them. Do you see a 21st-Century city such as Santa Clarita being able to accommodate heavy industry?

A. I don’t think this city needs to accommodate or wants to accommodate dirty industry. The environmental implications are too great. You’re talking about a city that last week had days with high ozone impacts. When it comes to industry that contributes to that ozone, that the city will not accept.

In addition, you have a very enlightened population, and they don’t want to have industries that might contaminate the soil or potentially contaminate the water.

We have 50% dependency on our ground water here, and that’s a major issue to us as we bring in high-tech industry: What kind is it, are they using chemicals? How are they going to dispose of their waste? Will they create pollution problems? But obviously this commmunity is, from a planning perspective, headed toward a major industry employer.

*

Q. What do you think will bring industry here?

A. Location, people that have the skills to work, people that locate here because it’s a good place to live and yet it’s not far from L. A., the airport and downtown L. A. People could live in Frazier Park and even Bakersfield or way up in the Antelope Valley or on the beach in Ventura and still work here.

*

Q. What do you think Santa Clarita’s identity is? Does it have one yet?

A. I don’t think it has an identity, yet. Until the urban core is developed some more, pretty much we still have a Saugus-Canyon Country-Valencia-Newhall kind of a thing. But what is planned for the 2,000 acres in the heart of the city can tie all that together and create an image.

The city in 10 years will probably have an identity of being a very nice community of close to 200,000 people. It will be very much self-sustaining. It can provide an image of youth, a kind of high recreation, athletic kind of activity, and to some extent there’s a Western flavor.

*

Q. How much do things that go on outside the city’s borders threaten what you are trying to do here?

A. From a planning point of view, there was a real opportunity here to have this city be created, managed and planned after years and years of experience of sprawl in Los Angeles. By not having the 90 square miles approved as originally was proposed, we have no sphere of influence, which is really counter to the intent of the law of the state.

You create a whole bunch of bureaucratic, government processing issues for each of the projects outside of the city that is needlessly done. It causes the city to inherit areas that are substandard, and we have to invest a lot of money to bring them up. It’s unfortunate that you have to have two jurisdictions doing the same thing right next to each other, especially in a community like this, which is separated distinctly from Los Angeles by the Santa Susana Mountains and the Angeles National Forest.

From a government efficiency point of view, it made sense to have that here, but because of philosophical differences, because of landowners and developers having some paranoia of an uncertain City Council and its policies, we have this situation. We are trying to make the best of it, and it will be a challenge for a long, long time to come to reconcile the differences along the borders.

‘I don’t think this city needs to accommodate or wants to accommodate dirty industry. The environmental implications are too great.’