Collecting signatures in a petition drive aimed at allowing La Jolla to separate from the City of San Diego and turn into its own municipality is nearly over.

Now the fundraising needed to lay the legal and technical groundwork to detach La Jolla from San Diego has begun.

A grassroots effort led by the nonprofit Association for the City of La Jolla was formed three years ago with a five-member board – Trace Wilson, Sharon Wampler, Diane Kane, Ed Witt, and Mary Munk – to explore the possibility of transforming La Jolla into a city.

In order to begin the process for doing that, the ACLJ must satisfy the legal requirement of submitting signatures from 25% of registered voters age 18-plus in La Jolla, 7,000-plus signatures in total.

“There’s a sort of milestone here,” said ACLJ spokesperson Trace Wilson. “Whatever happened in the past has never gotten this far. We have received just under 8,000 signatures, and they’re still coming in. We need to get the (city boundary) map into LAFCO by Jan. 31. Our next step after that is to fundraise for LAFCO’s consulting time and our preliminary, comprehensive fiscal analysis to get our (cityhood) application into them.”

LAFCO is an acronym for Local Agency Formation Commission. It is a regional planning and regulatory agency with county-wide jurisdiction, established by state law. LAFCOs mandated mission is to responsibly coordinate logical and timely changes in local governmental boundaries. It conducts special studies that review ways to reorganize, simplify, and streamline governmental structure, preparing a sphere of influence for each city and special district within its boundaries.

There have been a handful of unsuccessful attempts over the years in community-led drives to incorporate La Jolla. There is however a major structural hurdle that incorporation proponents have thus far been unable to clear: a favorable vote on incorporation would have to pass both within the boundaries of the new city of La Jolla, as well as with voters within the City of San Diego.

ACLJ, while making headway in its grassroots efforts to get La Jolla incorporated, still faces serious headwinds in doing so.

Recently, in a Voice of San Diego podcast, San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria said he didn’t think La Jollans would support the incorporation effort at the ballot box, once they found out what doing so would entail in terms of providing public services such as police and sewage. Gloria said the City would not be contracting those services out.

District 1 Councilmember Joe LaCava, who represents La Jolla and is now council president, has not taken a stance with regard to La Jolla’s incorporation.

“I have chosen at this time to remain neutral because La Jollans are looking for someone who can give them objective answers to their questions,” said LaCava. “Who created this idea in the first place? What does this mean for us as La Jollans? When will I get more detailed information? What is the process going forward? What is the likelihood of success? As a La Jollan who lives within the boundaries that they have drawn up, I think that (neutrality) is the best place for me right now. It will go through a long process with LAFCO to understand whether the boundary is drawn appropriately. And then there will be a process going forward. They need someone who will just give them objective answers to their questions. That’s the role I’m filling right now.”

LaCava pointed out that what La Jolla is attempting to do is far from easy. “I would simply point to the fact that, in California, only one community has successfully detached from another City,” he said. “And that was Coronado in the 1800s. That speaks to the challenge.”

Concluded LaCava: “Incorporation is a much different, and easier, process than to detach from an existing city. Is there an opportunity for them to navigate that? There certainly is. But that still needs to be played out. It’s a small group that has brought this forward. They go under the tagline imagine. To run a city it takes more than just imagine. There are a lot of details that need to be worked out.”