Various proposals have been made to create a new county in California called High Desert County, which would be located in portions of Los Angeles, Kern or San Bernardino counties.
Due to cultural and geographic differences between the rural and urban portions of Los Angeles, Kern and San Bernardino counties, various attempts have been made in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s to form a new county in the high desert regions of these counties. [1] [2] [3]
In 1998, California state senator William J. Knight proposed a plan to create a new county out of the northern half of Los Angeles and the eastern half of Kern counties. That year, Knight proposed a bill to create a panel to study whether this county should be created. [4] [5] [1] Knight also introduced a bill to eliminate the signature-collecting step required to get the proposal on the ballot to allow local residents to vote on the matter. By placing the proposal on the ballot, Knight hoped that the proposal would not be blocked by legislators who wanted to keep Santa Clarita, Lancaster and Palmdale in Los Angeles County, Victor Valley in San Bernardino County, and Mojave and California City in Kern County. [1]
In an effort to place the vote on the ballot, Knight planned to draft an amendment to the California Constitution that would change voting procedures for forming a new county, allowing only people within the boundary of the proposed area to vote on the matter. The amendment would require a two-thirds vote of the California Legislature. [1] [2] The legislative proposal was ultimately changed to call for "a commission to study the services received by desert residents of Los Angeles, Kern and San Bernardino counties, and to evaluate the financial feasibility of creating a new county." [6] [7]
Beginning in the 1970s, Santa Clarita, California founder Carl Boyer argued that northern portions of the San Fernando Valley should secede from Los Angeles County. [3] In January 2013, Boyer "again argued that Santa Clarita and other high desert semi-arid communities separate north of the San Fernando Valley secede from Los Angeles County and form our own new county. Call it High Desert County or Mountain County or Land of the Dry Rivers County -whatever- we need to secede from Los Angeles County". [3]
Southern California is a geographic and cultural region that generally comprises the southern portion of the U.S. state of California. It includes the Los Angeles metropolitan area as well as the Inland Empire. The region generally contains ten of California's 58 counties: Imperial, Kern, Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, and Ventura counties.
Los Angeles County, officially the County of Los Angeles, and sometimes abbreviated as L.A. County, is the most populous county in the United States, with 9,861,224 residents estimated in 2022. Its population is greater than that of 40 individual U.S. states. Comprising 88 incorporated cities and many unincorporated areas within a total area of 4,083 square miles (10,570 km2), it is home to more than a quarter of Californians and is one of the most ethnically diverse U.S. counties. The county's seat, Los Angeles, is the second most populous city in the United States, with 3,822,238 residents estimated in 2022. The county has been world-renowned as the domicile of the U.S. motion-picture industry since the latter's inception in the early 20th century.
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