The Rossmoor Community Services Distrct has hired the accounting firm of Harvey M. Rose, LLC., to analyze the Local Agency Formation Commission “Case Study” that said merging three Sun Region communities into a single city would save the public money.
The RCSD Board apparently authorized the district’s general manager to hire the accounting firm at a special meeting held Tuesday, Oct. 25.
“The engagement at this time was limited to an alalysis of the case study as it related to comparative data between Rossmoor and the county,” wrote General Manager Henry Taboada in a staff report to the District.
The staff report on Rossmoor governance will be presented Tuesday night, Nov. 8, at the monthly RCSD Board meeting. Rossmoor officials have complained that the county has not provided figures documenting how much it costs the county government to provide services to Rossmoor. According to the Taboada staff report, the  most recent response to Rossmoor’s request for county expense information is found in a recent LAFCO report that advocates merging Rossmoor with Seal Beach and Los Alamitos into a single city.
Orange County Supervisor John Moorlach sees the matter differently. “This report [the “Shared Services Case Study”] was not designed to address what Rossmoor was costing the county,” Moorlach wrote in a Wednesday, Nov. 2 Update to his constituents. “That was done numerous times in 2007-2008 for the incorporation effort, concluding that Rossmoor had a $600,000 annual deficit.  To state now that there was not such a report is showing an ignorance of the facts. “
Rossmoor intends to ask the Orange County LAFCO board for “latent powers” to hire law enforcement, animal control and trash collection services. County Supervisor John Moorlach, who chairs OC LAFCO, has described latent powers as “city-lite” and questioned the logic of latent powers for the district. LAFCO is the angecy with the authority to grant or deny “latent powers” to Rossmoor.
The Rossmoor latent powers application appears to be a response to LAFCO’s efforts to promote the annexation of Rossmoor by Los Alamitos. However, some Rossmoor residents—including Sun “Rossmoorgate” columnist Joyce Bloom—see the application as an attempt to impose cityhood on Rossmoor voters who rejected incorporation years ago. The city of Los Alamitos has begun the process of annexing one business area of Rossmoor. RCSD Board members are officially opposed to that partial annexation.
