Salida has sought city status for decades but faces challenges
Becoming a city is something the unincorporated town of Salida has looked into for years – but the incorporation process makes that almost impossible.
Salida’s efforts to incorporate have been part of a longstanding pushback from residents who are concerned about being annexed by the city of Modesto – something sought by proponents of the proposed Scannell Warehouse Project.
“We’re the largest unincorporated community in Stanislaus County,” said Katherine Borges, a previous member of the Salida Municipal Advisory Committee and advocate for Salida becoming a new city. “We don’t get to represent ourselves.”
The Stanislaus Local Agency Formation Commission, the agency responsible for city and district boundaries, regulates the process.
Sara Lytle-Pinhey, the CEO of LAFCO, said the process to become an incorporated city in Stanislaus County is complicated and long.
She said the topic gets brought up once every 10 years or so. In her 21 years at LAFCO, it’s come up twice.
Both times were about Salida, a community of about 14,500 people — almost double the population of the last new city, Hughson — according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
San Joaquin County’s Mountain House, incorporated in July 2024 as the newest city in California, had a well-thought-out process and even some legislative help.
“I want to say it was a decade, if not more, of advanced planning to get to that point,” Lytle-Pinhey said.
Steps in the incorporation process
The process starts with a group advocating for the shift. For Salida, that was an ad hoc committee as part of the Salida Chamber of Commerce around 2014, and before that another group in 2005. But so far, LAFCO hasn’t received a formal application for incorporation.
The steps in the process include:
- Get a petition by a proponent group or existing district to apply
- Create a special district, a small-scale government entity, to handle something a city normally would, such as trash, water, sewer, etc., at the request of residents.
- Get a financial feasibility study done to prove the area can sustain itself as a city
- Hold an election to confirm residents want to become a city.
One thing that strengthens an application is providing services like trash pickup, to show that the community can absorb some of those responsibilities on its own. For example, Salida has a sanitary district.
“I think it’s important because it’s already established that there’s people in the area who are designing a specialized service, and they are willing to pay for that service,” Lytle-Pinhey said. “So it’s already some sort of organized government function.”
On March 7, Chris Ricci, Modesto’s City Council member for district 3, posted on his Facebook page: “Apparently Salida needs Modesto’s water to incorporate. It is odd that a community that doesn’t want to be in Modesto wants Modesto services.”
But the creation of a new agency to fulfill complex public services like water is actually the least preferred option, Lytle-Pinhey said. Usually, a community looks to an incorporated entity nearby to pursue a contract for the service. For Salida, that would be Modesto.
Things like a public works department, building permits and a city council all would have to be established by the new city.
Feasibility studies are required to show that the new city would be able to maintain itself. The cost of this depends on the amount of LAFCO staff time needed to complete the study – and it can be pricey.
East Los Angeles, which is an unincorporated area in Los Angeles County, recently completed a feasibility study that concluded it couldn’t afford to incorporate.
Michael Seaman is chair of California Unincorporated, a group that advocates for the needs of unincorporated towns throughout the state.
“In a nutshell, the state has made it impossible to form a city unless you happen to have a ton of resources locally,” Seaman said. “If you’re a privileged community with a whole lot of money, then you can overcome the expense of becoming a city and you can deal with the cumbersome regulatory environment of becoming a city.”
Lytle-Pinhey said it’s about making something that lasts. “The fear is that you don’t want to form a city and then have that city fail in the next two or three years and have to unwind all of that back into an unincorporated area,” she said.
Cityhood benefits include tax revenue staying local
One benefit of incorporating is that property taxes that were going to the county would remain with the new city.
“The funds that we pay as taxpayers do not come back to us to be spent in our community,” Borges said.
Another is that a city can regulate itself and make its own decisions.
Seaman said there are about 6 million people in California who have no mayors or city council representatives — nobody to look out for local priorities other than their county supervisors.
“We don’t get to represent ourselves,” Borges said. “They’ll go and put stuff here or want to put stuff here and we don’t get a say in the matter – it drives us absolutely bananas.”
Some drawbacks include finding the funding necessary to take on the new responsibilities like maintaining a workforce to provide city services or contracting other services.
“If there’s certain unincorporated areas where their board of supervisors is their representation and they love their ... supervisor, maybe they don’t want to change,” Lytle-Pinhey said. “Then there’s other instances where they’re probably people saying, ‘We want better representation for our district just for our area.’”
If all of the parts of the process for becoming a new city are completed through LAFCO, a final decision would be a vote by residents on how they want to move forward.
This story was originally published May 28, 2025 at 12:30 PM.
