Reality Check: Santa Clarita will lose to the state.
In his Feb. 20 column, “Virtue Signaling or Fighting the New Courthouse?” John Boston called today’s Santa Clarita citizens virtue signalers, in contrast to his fellow boomers of old who actually fought for cityhood and successfully kept the largest dump in the world out of our valley. But his humorless attempt to drum up community backlash against the state’s decision to place a half-billion-dollar L.A. County Superior Court building at Valencia Town Center will fail. Why? The city had its chance to steer the Judicial Council to a perhaps more suitable location for the courthouse; instead, they too failed to realize that the only effective power that they have over the state in this situation is the power to persuade.
While the Judicial Council made sincere attempts to work with Santa Clarita on courthouse placement, the state never needed our blessing. Our city leaders could not accept the fact that they were in no position to tell the state to put the courthouse in a fringe, undesirable, out-of-the-way, or outside-the-city location as they tried to do. Without helpful input from our city, state officials rightfully went their own way.
Santa Clarita is the fastest growing part of the greater Los Angeles area; the state has just invested half a billion dollars in expanding Interstate 5; and the state needs to update and expand its court facilities in L.A. County. With the new courthouse, the state has decided to move all adult felony cases that arise out of the Santa Clarita Valley back to where they originate.
It is important to note that our new courthouse will not be built to handle adult felony cases arising outside of the SCV. It is true that, to save money, the state has decided to consolidate courthouse function by moving 19 civil case dockets from other parts of the county and all juvenile cases that are currently handled in Sylmar to the new courthouse. Perhaps it isn’t fair that all juvenile cases that arise out of the San Fernando Valley will be handled in Santa Clarita, but management of our county’s courts and criminal justice system, which happens to be the largest in the United States, is outside of the city of Santa Clarita’s purview.
Furthermore, the architect of Valencia, the late Victor Gruen, would actually be proud that the new eight-story courthouse will be located at the Valencia Town Center. No fan of shopping malls stripped of living quarters and thriving civic centers, he originally conceptualized our town center in the 1960s as having tall buildings like the new courthouse. Consistent with the original Valencia master plan, the proposed courthouse on McBean Parkway is in a great location by design: It’s very close to Interstate 5; it’s less than a mile from the firehouse and the sheriff’s station; it’s a little more than a mile to our regional hospital; and it’s already connected via paseo bridge to the mall and to the 110 miles of paseos and trials that define our city.
Currently, the town center already has the six-story Princess Cruises building, and the proposed 2,200 additional residents who will make Valencia Town Center home will not be going into single-family homes with yards but rather into tall buildings. This progress has been foreshadowed in the official city seal, adopted in 1988, which features not only a heritage oak tree, rolling hills, puffy clouds, and a single-family tract home, but also a tall, futuristic building.
Rather than titling at windmills as John Boston would have us do, city leaders should wise up and use their remaining power to influence the future architecture of the courthouse so that it is not a modern monstrosity dotted with out-of-place palm trees and desert landscaping that is more fitting for Las Vegas. The proposed site, while not environmentally protected due to its prior development, is directly adjacent to a valley oak savannah, and architecture like the Newhall Library’s would better reflect the landscape. City leaders have a lot of work to do, not only through zoning laws (e.g., restricting bail bonds businesses) and through thoughtful road design, but also the important work that they do best: making our city aesthetically pleasing and historically grounded by preserving the vestiges of our own western past in building and landscape architecture and through public art displays.
May the future Santa Clarita courthouse not be an “atomic eyesore” as John Boston assumes it will be but a beautiful beacon of justice that strengthens our community.
Kevin T. Kelly
Valencia
