(March 30) San Bernardino County will increase the number of its incorporated municipalities to 25 under the latest proposal relating to unifying the communities around Lake Arrowhead in the San Bernardino Mountains.
In response to incorporation sentiment in the mountain region, the San Bernardino County Local Agency Formation Commission has commissioned Santa Ana-based Rosenow Spevacek Group Inc. to weigh in on the feasibility of unifying the unincorporated communities of Lake Arrowhead, Crestline, Running Springs, Arrowbear, Green Valley Lake, Skyforest, Rim Forest, Twin Peaks, Blue Jay and Cedar Glen into a single 40-square mile city.
There have been previous efforts to incorporate Lake Arrowhead, which is the most economically vital of the area’s towns. None of those reached fruition.
An impetus driving the current effort is the proliferation of sober-living homes and drug-rehabilitation centers in the communities, resulting in tension within the neighborhoods where those facilities are located. Many area residents have expressed the belief that the board of supervisors, none of whose members live in the San Bernardino Mountains, had any sensitivity to the issue. Moreover, they say, the county’s permitting and regulation of the drug rehab facilities is lax. It is the belief of some that a newly created city would be able to take command of land use policy and zoning to either prohibit or significantly limit such businesses and residential facilities in the area.
Rosenow Spevacek’s focus will not pertain to land use policies, but the nuts-and-bolts practicality of the economic viability of the specified communities coalescing into a single unit, and whether the revenue to be generated tax-wise and assessment-wise from within the proposed boundaries would sustain the cost of providing standard municipal services.
The area in question is on the western side of the San Bernardino Mountains, within the county’s Second Supervisorial District. After the 2010 Census, a portion of what had been the Third Supervisorial District, which previously contained the lion’s share of the San Bernardino Mountains, was moved into the Second District. The San Bernardino Mountains currently boast a single incorporated city, Big Bear, which lies on the eastern side of the mountains in the Third District. Big Bear, with a population of 5,124 is the county’s second smallest city.
If Lake Arrowhead, Crestline, Running Springs, Arrowbear, Green Valley Lake, Skyforest, Rim Forest, Twin Peaks, Blue Jay and Cedar Glen were to be consolidated into a single city, the population in that municipality would total at least 30,327, making it larger than Needles, Big Bear, Grand Terrace, Yucca Valley, Loma Linda, Barstow and Twentynine Palms, such that it would be the seventeenth largest and eighth smallest of what would then be the county’s 25 cities.