A collective gasp must have emanated from City Hall Monday as civic leaders eagerly paged through the latest CNN/Money Best Cities list only to find that Santa Clarita was not in the running this year.

The list, compiled each year by CNN and Money Magazine, purports to be an authority on which cities are the best to raise a family in, to be single in, or the best cities for commuters.

Last year, Santa Clarita was named the top city in California. At nearly every public event or city council meeting, City leaders mention this fact, usually placing the adjectives “amazing” or “astounding” or “incredible” in front of it. It’s even trumpeted on the City’s website as of this morning.

Now they will have to modify it; Santa Clarita was only best in 2007.
In 2008, we didn’t even get an honorable mention and lost out in California to Roseville, Irvine, Sunnyvale, and Fountain Valley.

Indeed, not only did Santa Clarita not place in California, but we didn’t even make the top 100 list nationally.

The top cities to live in according to this esteemed analysis are Plymouth, Minnesota, Ft. Collins Colorado, Naperville Illinois, Irvine California (SHOCK!), Franklin Township New Jersey, Norman Oklahoma, Columbia Maryland, Overland Park Kansas, and Fishers Indiana.

Yeah, double check that list. We lost out to six cities located in the so-called Flyover states.

How could this be?

Well, I consider the list to be quite silly in the first place, and no one would buy a Money Magazine issue with the same cities as last year, so it’s possible that the editors don’t actually think Santa Clarita is worse than Irvine, they just needed fresh copy for 2008.

Besides, some of the statistics used in the report seem to be suspect anyway. Just check out Santa Clarita’s page.

Who knew, for instance, that Santa Clarita had an astounding 44 movie theaters within a 15 mile range? And here you thought that the only movie options were the two crowded Edwards theaters that show kid-friendly flicks!

Or how about the weather stats? Money Mag says our high in July is 85 degrees, but I’ve got several wilted and burned plants on my balcony begging to differ.

As for our vaunted school system in Santa Clarita, Money says we don’t have much to be proud of nationally: in math, for instance, the SCV’s best and brightest scored 13.7% below the national average. Aye caramba!

Many of us are unhealthy and single too. Some 10% of us are divorced and 12.8% of us have diabetes, but despair not! We’ve got plenty of restaurants (3,530), scores of libraries (35), and 165 bars to drown our sorrows in.

So you see what I’m getting at? Like the Uniform Crime Index, this list is largely meaningless. Even when Money compares apples with apples (median housing price, for instance), they can’t measure unquantifiable things like the entertainment value one gets from City Council meetings. Nor does the list capture excitement of the Annual Fire Season or the scores of hokey charity galas that we all attend.

So rest easy Santa Clarita. We’re still a great place to live. Money Magazine can go pound sand.