View Petition Held Threat to Privacy

Your March 11 South Bay edition reports that the P.V. Peninsula destroy-the-tree advocates have now induced a sufficient number of naive residents to sign petitions promoting a new “view-protecting” ordinance to propel this misguided proposal to a formal election. This proposed ordinance could require the destruction of any form of natural vegetation that had the unmitigated brass to interfere with any human resident’s view of the array of incandescent lamps, asphalt, cement and stucco that is occasionally visible through the smog on the flat lands down below.

I recognize that, in this land of the free, every citizen has the constitutionally guaranteed right to petition in support of almost any issue or purpose, but this present petition will only serve to create a legal basis for further costly and counterproductive intrusion of government into our private lives.

What legal or moral basis do these petitioners have for proposing to invoke the power of government to impose on their neighbors the petitioners’ own personal aesthetic values? One person’s image of beauty may well represent another person’s vision of ugliness, and, under our present Constitution, neither has broken any law, for such values, thankfully, are not yet subject to statutory constraint. The proposed regulation presumes to remedy that wise omission in the law by authorizing the legislating of personal taste and aesthetic judgment. The subjective and ambiguous whims of the petitioners, as interpreted and enforced by some faceless bureaucrat, would provide the capricious criteria by which all of us would be required to manage our private property. This is a recipe for social and legal disaster.

I am not a lawyer, but even a relatively untutored layman can perceive the endless and expensive problems, and neighborhood fragmentation and bitterness that inevitably will result from this ill-conceived exercise. If enacted, the only view that this unfortunate ordinance will protect will be the view the lawyers have of the resulting monumental legal fees.

While I do not dispute any citizen’s right to prefer asphalt, stucco and electric lights over trees, leaves, and stars, it seems totally unjustifiable, even undemocratic, that my personal preference for the latter may be subject to the legal, social, and economic harassment that this regulation surely will generate.

ROBERT S. COUGHLIN

Rancho Palos Verdes