Happy Birthday, Lake Forest

Monday, Dec. 20, is Lake Forest's 19th anniversary as an incorporated city.

We want to hear from you about your time in Lake Forest. Maybe you've been here a month; maybe you've been here since it was still considered a rural area. Either way, leave a comment and tell us one of your favorite memories from your time in town. Why do you stick around here, anyway?

To get things rolling, here's a portion of what City Councilwoman Marcia Rudolph told us when we spoke with her in November about incorporation. She's been on the council since the start. Did you know that before Lake Forest was brought into existence, Rudolph and others tried to get residents to approve the creation of the city of Saddleback Valley, which would have included Laguna Hills and Aegean Hills (now a part of Mission Viejo)? That's where her story begins:

We had an election, and the city failed because of Nellie Gail. They didn't want to be part of "El Toro." It really was a snobby thing. It didn't make it, and, yeah, in retrospect it was an overreach.

At that point, I moved on to El Toro. At that point, we said, "What do we do?" Incorporation was the most important thing when you look at tax revenues. You say, "Wait a minute, we want those dollars local." An agreement was reached with Laguna Hills that we would chop off our incorporations at the freeway.

We took everything on our side of the freeway: El Toro, Lake Forest, Portola Hills, Foothill Ranch, all the way up to Cook's Corner. Laguna Hills proceeded to their campaign. We did ours. So in March of 1991 there was an election for the Laguna Hills people and our people. Both incorporations won. The county, because they were used to our revenue, determined that we could not be official until December. You look at the logo for Lake Forest, it says Dec. 20, 1991, because the county kept us a bay till then.

We became official on a windy day of 1991. There had been an agreement that Laguna Hills would have their incorporation celebration and first meeting in the morning, and ours was going to be at 11 o'clock, noon, up on Heritage Hill. We were where the stage is in Heritage Hill. We had our first official council meeting that day. Basically, all you do is declare yourself official and you have to make the decisions official: We are a general-law city—that was determined on the ballot, the name too. We passed all the official code over from the county, and they became our city codes.


One clarification: While the original plan for Lake Forest did include Foothill Ranch and Portola Hills, those two neighborhoods were removed before the election—only to be annexed again a decade later.