Just next door to the Port of Los Angeles, often touted as the gateway to Southern California trade, is a neighborhood in Wilmington that residents refer to simply as the “Third World.”
Amid junkyards, barbed-wire-topped fences and stacks of shipping containers are families living behind corrugated metal walls and sharing unpaved streets with big-rigs, drug dealers and hookers.
Welcome to Wilmington, San Pedro and Harbor City, home of L.A.’s other secession movement.
While leaders in the wealthier and more politically connected San Fernando Valley see secession as a way to better determine their own fate, the movement here takes on a grittier, blue-collar feel.
The area is generally poor especially Wilmington and not well connected. Only 53,000 residents are registered to vote, compared with 540,000 in the Valley. Plus, the Valley folks tend to vote more often.
Residents are bitter about what they see as neglect on the part of the city. They have only to look around them at the junk-strewn industrial areas of Wilmington and the deteriorating business district of San Pedro to know they have little clout with a City Hall more than 20 miles away.
“As far as the city is concerned, we’re a throwaway community,” said Andrew Mardesich, leader of a secession group calling itself the Harbor Study Foundation. “The juice and pulp is the port, and San Pedro and Wilmington are the rind.”
While the harbor area may be viewed as an ugly duckling, its potential as a secession candidate has huge financial and political implications. Besides the port, the area boasts a large portion of L.A.’s industrial base, which generates millions of dollars in business taxes and permit fees.
“We know the city is going to fight us every step of the way,” said Xavier Hermosillo, director of a separate secession group known as HarborVote. “But we’re a salty seaport community. Our people came from Italy, Yugoslavia, Scandinavia and Mexico. We’re used to taking it on the chin, working hard, and we don’t take no for an answer.”
Harbor-area residents like Hermosillo hope to join the Valley in having the question of secession put to voters in 2002. Supporters recently gathered more than 16,000 signatures to force a study of secession by the Local Agency Formation Commission, the agency that decides municipal annexations and detachments.
The group came up 20 signatures short of the 13,470 required signatures, but the secessionists are expected to easily make up the difference as a result of a two-week grace period granted to the petitioners.
Even so, the harbor area’s secession movement has been a low-budget effort hardly resembling the war chest being assembled in the Valley to hire attorneys and economists.
“I’ve been around the block, but to be quite frank with you, at this stage of the game, now that we’re in the running, I’m scared (to death),” said Mardesich, who works as a paralegal. “We are very, very vulnerable when it comes to qualified legal support. One of my biggest challenges will be to get the intelligentsia of the community more involved.”
Mardesich believes success will depend on closely watching the Valley, and mimicking its legal moves when it appears to benefit the harbor area.
Larry Calemine, executive director of LAFCO, said it will be the board’s job to make sure that the harbor gets a fair shake. The study, which is expected to cost as much as $2.6 million and take as long as two years, will determine whether the city of Los Angeles or the local area would be hurt financially by secession.
Barry Glickman, chief of staff to Councilman Rudy Svorinich Jr., who represents the district, said Svorinich agrees there has been neglect by City Hall and believes he has made strides in making improvements. In the past, Svorinich has said he would not take a position on secession until an official study of its economic impact is completed.
Svorinich did not return repeated calls for comment.
Wilmington and San Pedro joined the city of Los Angeles in 1909 on the promise that the city would spend millions to improve the port. But residents say little attention has ever been paid to the surrounding area.
Gertrude Schwab, who briefly served on the Harbor Commission, said the port has turned Wilmington into an industrial wasteland, leaving the community to cope with the truck and train traffic, junkyards and recycling plants without receiving anything in return.
“The community has absolutely no say in what goes on here,” she said.
But Larry Keller, executive director of the city’s Harbor Department, said the port has taken an active role in the area, building a community center in Wilmington, providing on-site day care at the port, and even taking over a commercial area in San Pedro and working to make improvements.
“We think we’re good neighbors,” Keller said. “We’ve had all kinds of commitments to this community for years. Are we doing enough? Depends on who you ask.”
Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, argued that the ills are more a result of geography than neglect.
“The heavy infrastructure for the port had to go through there. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that the neighborhood would have to bear the burden,” he said.
Still, Guerra believes that the city erred by not being more environmentally sensitive and figuring out ways to balance the needs of industry and residents. Rather than tear apart the city, he added, harbor residents should work within the system and the newly reformed city charter to get better treatment.
But Hermosillo sees charter reform as a joke. “The charter is meaningless to us,” he said. “All charter reform did was update an old document, but it doesn’t give us what’s rightfully ours.”
Mardesich, meanwhile, sees the secession process as a chance to demand improvements from the city. “In this two-year period that the study is going forward, let’s milk it for all it’s worth,” he said. “If the voters don’t go for (secession), then we’ll have a better Wilmington and San Pedro.”
In fact, the groups headed by Mardesich and Hermosillo are divided over whether to proceed wholeheartedly with secession or to use it as leverage to win more service and improvements from the city. But that dispute won’t stop the economic impact study from going forward.
Gertrude Schwab only knows that she wants the area to leave L.A. “You have to fight for everything you want, and we’re tired of fighting. Secession is our only hope,” she said.
