Today's Modesto Bee had an article by Kathleen Quinn entitled "Salida has sought city status for decades but faces challenges." As an item of journalistic coverage of the plight of unincorporated areas, it's fairly good. Both California (un)Incorporated and our Salida colleague, Katherine Borges - were accurately presented. What the article got right is that the process of municipal incorporation in California is overly difficult. Changing that is pretty much why we exist as an organization.

We have a few nit picks with the article. We present them here for clarification:

• Mountain House's incorporation was the result of thoughtful long-term planning and subseqquent investment by San Joaquin County. It took 30 years to come to fruition and the new city is the ONLY city out of 423 in California that doesn't derive any revenues from the property tax component of motor vehicle license fees (VLF). While we applaud San Joaquin County for its foresight, we remain unconvinced that it needed to take so long. And we share the City of Mountain House's concern that it should not be denied VLF-related revenues.
• Initiating the "make a city" process via signature collection is unrealistically expensive.
• While a community does not have to have one or more special districts in place as a precursor to becoming a city, it does help. Still, we are aware of many cities where the special district(s) have not been involved or have been overlooked by the local LAFCO. That said, California (un)Incorporated wants no harm to come to a special district as the result of an incorporation.
• Financial feasibility studies required by Local Agency Formation Commissions (LAFCOs) are usually done by consultants and have often been used as a club to beat up on citizens who wish to form a city. that's because it is all too easy for a LAFCO to overestimate the costs and underestimate the revenues. While our initial orientation is to view Stanislaus County's LAFCO as ethical, we cannot say the same about LAFCOs elsewhere. LAFCOs often make cityhood proponents pay for the consultants who write those financial documents, but they do not give the payees any control over the consultant's work. And in the case of some LAFCOs, outrageous declarations like "they must pay a premium price for a city manager" can thus get baked into the analysis to mislead the public.
• Misleading financial analysis was a core theme of the East Los Angeles report cited in the article. For instance, LA County claimed some of its areawide services as municipal costs East LA would have to undertake. Contact our East LA colleagues for more information.

Overall, though, we are thankful that the Modesto Bee has put a spotlight on our friends in Salida. We hope the Bee will find the courage to follow through by trying to find out why state laws are used to fight proposed new cities in Caliofonia.