A recently released report by the 2014/2015 Orange County Grand Jury will make the Rossmoor Community Service District’s pursuit of obtaining a so-called “latent power” that would have Orange County transfer responsibility for sheriff’s services to the District, even more unlikely to succeed than ever.
The report is critical of Local Agency Formation Commission, (the regulatory commission that controls the boundaries of cities and special districts) for not doing enough to eliminate the county’s so called “islands.”
These islands are unincorporated areas adjacent to cities for which the county provides their municipal services. The report deems this inefficient and urges LAFCO and the county to do more to see that these areas are annexed by an adjacent city, as was done recently with Sunset Beach being annexed by Huntington Beach. The report also addresses special districts (such as the RCSD) and is critical of LAFCO doing too little to eliminate or consolidate special districts.
In light of this report, it is highly unlikely that LAFCO and the county would go in a direction that expands the powers of the RCSD. Thus the continued pursuit of latent powers by the RCSD, specifically to have the county transfer sheriff’s services to the District is more unrealistic than ever.
The issue of whether such a transfer would be beneficial for the community is a separate and debatable issue. What is not debatable are the past costs incurred in pursuing this latent power and the future costs if this pursuit continues. While the sheriff’s union has contributed a lot of the costs (they must have some kind of vested interest in this), the District has used staff time and the cost of a consultant resulting in tens of thousands of dollars of district funds being spent and continuing to be spent.
The RCSD does a good job in providing the services of park maintenance, parkway tree maintenance and recreation that they were mandated to do by the citizens of Rossmoor. They would be well advised to focus on these services and cut its losses in pursuit of latent powers.
