A community member-led effort for La Jolla to become its own city had its final petition drives. NBC 7’s Kelvin Henry reports.
The ongoing effort for La Jolla to break away from the City of San Diego is in full swing. The effort has been decades in the making.
“We’ve always sort of been our own entity. We have our own Post Office, our own zip code and these go back to the 1930s,” said Diane Kane, Vice President of the Association for the City of La Jolla.
The group had a setback recently when they fell short of the necessary signatures to get the ball rolling on breaking up from the City of San Diego. The Association for the City of La Jolla fell more than 1,000 signatures short of the 6,750 valid signatures required for the process of incorporating, according to the Registrar of voters.
The push to meet the requirement has been ongoing since the group was notified they fell short and only had a short window to meet the benchmark.
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The signature requirement is one of many steps the group must meet, with them already putting in the work to meet some of the other requirements.
“We’ve done a financial analysis that indicates we can take the same amount of money we are currently giving the City of San Diego and deliver the same level of services,” Kane said.
In fact, she is confident the area can do a better job.
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“We think we could do a better job of delivering services here for the community if we had a smaller entity that can be a little nimbler and a little more efficient than working through the City of San Diego,” Kane said.
She stressed it is a win-win situation for everyone involved.
The deadline to submit the necessary signatures is April 1.
If the group meets all of the requirements to break away from the City of San Diego, the issue will be put before voters in a future election.
