They won't leaf well enough alone

By Jeff Gottlieb

Jan. 31, 2009 12 AM PT

From the backyard of their house, Philip and Eileen Peterson can see Catalina Island, the city of Long Beach and the port, Point Fermin and Cabrillo Beach, a view not uncommon in Rancho Palos Verdes.

But part of their view is blocked by trees belonging to their longtime neighbors below, across Crest Drive, and views are the thing in Rancho Palos Verdes. They are so important that in 1989 voters overwhelmingly passed one of the state’s first and strictest view-protection ordinances, which has twice passed court tests.

So along with six other homeowners on their street, the Petersons filed a complaint with the city to force their neighbors to cut and trim the offending foliage. The City Council last summer decided that three Crest Drive families had to trim or chop down 38 trees, including pines, redwoods, eucalyptus, jacarandas and Douglas firs.

Regardless of the view, if you look far enough you can always see a lawsuit, and that’s what happened in Rancho Palos Verdes. Two of the Crest Drive families have sued the city, asking: If the trees bothered the neighbors so much, why did they wait a decade and a half to ask them to do something? Their suit says there must be some kind of deadline.

“Our contention is you can’t go on doing this forever,” said Jeff Parker, the attorney representing the tree owners. “That’s what’s attracting people’s attention.”

Why did those complaining wait so long? “When you’re younger, you’re pushing the business, coming home late, watching a few minutes of the Lakers,” said Philip Peterson, a contractor who is installing a hot tub in his backyard. “It’s a cliche, but you get old and stop and smell the roses.”

Rancho Palos Verdes passed the view ordinance because people were not acting particularly neighborly. “We’ve all heard of stories of people going and cutting other people’s trees,” said Joel Rojas, the city’s director of planning, building and code enforcement. “Because a lot of that was going on, it inspired the people who wrote the ordinance to get something on the books so people weren’t going out and poisoning or cutting down trees at night.”

Since the ordinance was approved, 260 complaints have been filed. Only 73 have gone to city officials for a decision. The rest either were withdrawn or resolved through mediation, the first step in the view protection process.

Since Rancho Palos Verdes passed its ordinance, several other cities have followed suit, including Laguna Beach, Berkeley and Del Mar. Malibu is drafting one.

Though Rancho Palos Verdes’ ordinance was one of the first, it is not one that other cities have imitated. “From what I hear, it’s almost a model of what not to do,” Rojas said.

Ann Danforth, city attorney for the Bay Area town of Tiburon, often credited as the first in the state with view ordinance, agreed. “The Rancho Palos Verdes law,” she said, “would be a very difficult thing indeed.”

A couple of things make the Rancho Palos Verdes law stand out.

One is that the city enforces it. In most cities with view ordinances, neighbors must sue one another to force cutting. Just the cost of a lawsuit can promote compromise.

“It’s easy to turn it over to the city and let the city work it out,” Danforth said. “It lets you just push your fight as hard as you can.”

In addition, most ordinances protect the view that existed when the current owner bought the land. “If the owner sells the property, the bar is reset,” Danforth said. “It makes it a lot easier to enforce.”

In Rancho Palos Verdes, residents can keep trees at the height and bushiness they were at when the ordinance passed. They can also keep foliage at the level it was when the lot was created, even if it impairs the view.

“One of reasons this ordinance raises so much controversy is it pits neighbor to neighbor with two very emotional issues,” Rojas said. “One is views and the other is personal landscaping.”

When this dispute reached the City Council, each side tried to marshal evidence that the trees either were or weren’t there when the lots were created. They produced old photographs, including aerial shots from UCLA. There was testimony from arborists about the ages of trees. One neighbor brought a slice of a tree stump to prove its age.

Regina O’Melveny said she and her husband decided to sue because no one ever talked to them about the trees until the complaint was filed in November 2005. If they had known a while back that they’d have to cut the trees, they could have done the job at that time -- adjusting their landscaping and saving money.

Their next-door neighbors, Rae and Mil Wyman, who also are suing, spent $400,000 on landscaping in 1992. They removed most of the pines from their property, according to the lawsuit, leaving the trees people are complaining about. If they had known of the view problem at the time, according to the suit, they could have removed those trees instead.

The Wymans have lived in Rancho Palos Verdes for more than 40 years. The O’Melvenys are relative newcomers, having moved in 26 years ago. Their house is set back from the street and has so many trees that it feels as if it were in a forest.

A red bark eucalyptus near the street was Regina O’Melveny’s daughter’s lucky tree when she was growing up. Red-tailed and Cooper’s hawks like to sit in the redwoods.

O’Melveny worries that even trimming the trees will injure them and lead to beetle infestation. The trees cool her home and filter the pollution from the harbor. She calls cutting the trees “mutilation.”

“Obviously, we love the trees because we have no view,” said O’Melveny, an adjunct professor of English at nearby Marymount College.

“It would cause us a lot of grief to have to cut down trees we’ve been watering, nourishing, trees we love.”

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