Neighbors Express Mixed Reactions to Amphitheater Noise

Dave and Marianne Siedsma live directly across the street from the Pacific Amphitheatre and cannot understand the fuss some of their neighbors have made over the rock concerts there.

So news that Orange County Superior Court Judge Gary L. Taylor would soon order the amphitheater’s operators to reduce concert noise received no applause from the Siedsma household.

“It’s really not that loud over here,” said Dave Siedsma, who moved to the College Park neighborhood in Costa Mesa with his family three years ago.

“And they’re over by 10 or 10:30--come on, that’s not that late,” Marianne Siedsma said. “Some people just don’t like rock ‘n’ roll.”

A few blocks to the northeast, however, in the Mesa Del Mar area, where summer breezes blow tremulous guitar chords and earth-moving drum solos into homeowners’ backyards, Taylor’s decision got a warmer reception.

“How marvelous!” said Glenn Smith, out watering his front lawn on a warm Saturday afternoon. “Our family room is right there in front, and we have no way of opening the windows in the summer (on concert nights). We can feel the drums. We don’t have to pay for the concerts.”

Smith, an actor and speech instructor at Orange Coast College, said he is “not a troublemaker” and “not anti-music; I like loud.” But the concert noise was unbearable, he said, as was the intransigence on the part of the theater’s operators, Ned West Inc.

“Their attitude was, ‘We can do anything we damn want to,’ ” Smith said. “It’s really great to hear that this (the judge’s decision) has happened.”

Preliminary Injunction

On Friday, Taylor announced his intention to issue a preliminary injunction this week limiting noise levels around the amphitheater.

The neighborhood group that filed the lawsuit leading to the injunction, Concerned Citizens of Costa Mesa, still must win a trial to obtain a permanent injunction against Ned West.

But Taylor’s announcement promised, for the first time, at least temporary relief for shaken residents, and the message was not lost on them.

“Thank goodness!” said Eugenia Deats, who lives across from Glenn Smith on Presidio Drive and in the front-line of homes affected by the noise.

But while Deats, who says the rock concerts shake the walls of her home, welcomed the decision, she didn’t think it would do a whole lot of good.

“I doubt it,” Deats said. “We’re fighting big bucks.”

Deats said part of the blame for the noise lies with the Orange County Fair board, which allowed Ned West to build the 18,000-capacity theater. “I think they were negligent,” she said. “How could they let them get away with that.”

Whatever happens, Deats said she would not sell her home, as a neighbor recently had, at least partly because of the concert noise. “I’ve lived here 17 years,” she said.

Other Presidio Drive residents said they weren’t bothered by the noise.

“It’s something I’ve had to live with,” said 20-year resident Jane Helton. “There are worse things.”

“We live in the back of the house and don’t hear it at all,” said another resident, who declined to give his name.

But even music-lover Siedsma agreed that the sounds sometimes carry to the Mesa Del Mar neighborhood. “A couple of summers ago, I forgot to buy tickets for a Willie Nelson concert. I just went over there and sat down on that (Costa Mesa) high school grass. Willie came through clear as a whistle.”