Though some believe otherwise, La Jolla isn’t its own city. The Association for the City of La Jolla wants to change that and believes it has the financial numbers to make it happen.
La Jolla is currently a community within the city of San Diego, beholden to San Diego’s governance and policies.
ACLJ has been working for more than two years to explore independence for La Jolla, a long process that for some time has involved putting together a preliminary, comprehensive fiscal analysis detailing whether detaching from San Diego is feasible.
Feasibility in this case means net neutrality: The costs that go into a community and the revenue that comes out of it must equalize.
ACLJ President, Trace Wilson.
Final numbers will be available in the months to come, but the draft analysis shows La Jolla’s independence “is viable,” ACLJ President Trace Wilson told lajolla.ca.
“We know that we can make it work,” he said, “not only for the city … and the region of San Diego, but also for the community of La Jolla.
The benefits of incorporating La Jolla as its own city include “an economic uplift” for all in San Diego County, Wilson said, noting the city of San Diego would be released “of a huge amount of cost and liability” in managing La Jolla.
La Jolla would also contract services – such as police, fire and more – from San Diego, giving the larger city more revenue.
Those contracted services then become “not a liability for San Diego but a cash flow device,” he said.
The preliminary fiscal analysis draft, compiled by urban economist Richard Berkson with numbers provided by San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria’s office, is now being reviewed closely by ACLJ members.
“For the last five or six weeks we’ve been combing through the report,” Wilson said, “refining it, working … to get it into final status.”
The work completed so far ensures the group “this wasn’t a fool’s errand; there weren’t any fatal flaws,” he said.
ACLJ has also been meeting with elected officials and others throughout San Diego County to spread its message that “the numbers look good,” Wilson said.
“We will be taking it to the next level.”
Next steps
That next level involves an application to the San Diego Local Agency Formation Commission, which helps communities incorporate.
LAFCO will perform its own fiscal analysis and issue approval if it agrees the initiative is feasible.
Then two public votes are required, Wilson said: La Jolla residents will need to vote whether they support independence from San Diego; San Diego residents outside La Jolla will also have to vote to support the detachment.
Before that, however, ACLJ has been building out a team of consultants and political strategists and preparing to raise about $125,000 in addition to the first donations raised to fund the analysis.
“We do need donations,” Wilson said.
The more immediate work, however, is to poll San Diego residents outside La Jolla to “understand what folks throughout the city are thinking about this initiative,” he said, adding ACLJ will use the poll results to “ensure people are getting educated appropriately throughout the city of San Diego” about what detachment means for all.
Each of the nine San Diego City Council districts “has different viewpoints on various social matters and financial matters of San Diego,” Wilson said, perspectives that will be taken into account as the group moves forward.
