Resident Decides to Make Some Noise of Her Own

For almost three years, Maureen Shaner of La Jolla labored to create the perfect garden. It was an attempt, really, to relive the images of her English childhood--the manicured landscaping that graced the royal palaces and most of the yards around her suburban London home.

As the seasons changed, she toiled on her hands and knees, tilling the brown earth, installing a tiled walkway and a fountain to attract the many-colored birds. For Shaner, the garden was a place of peace, a back-yard sanctuary she used to collect her thoughts, organize her life.

“It’s a place to relish in your own peace and quiet,” she said in a lively British accent. “You can sort out a lot of things in your head when you start digging.”

But these are troubled times in Shaner’s paradise. Weeds are sprouting all over her retreat. They appear between the hand-laid tiles, even among the carefully planted gladioli and irises.

The birds still come to drink from the graceful stone fountain in the 300 block of Vista de la Playa, a few blocks from the sea. But now their songs are drowned out by man-made sounds--the racket of buzz-saws, power drills and hammer blows of a neighbor’s home construction project.

Each day at 7:21 a.m., Shaner says, the workmen start laboring on the shell of an ornate wooden house. The generator begins to hum and the router to whine, awakening her, her husband and their three children.

Week after week, month after month--for more than four years, she says--she has listened to this mechanical rattle and hum that is subjecting her country kingdom to the head-pounding sounds of the city.

So Shaner has given up on her garden. Instead, she

has focused her energies on San Diego City Hall, trying to make sense out of a foreign bureaucracy to get one simple question answered: “Why can’t someone stop the noise?”

No matter whom she has asked--city officials and the property owners themselves--Shaner still has no idea when the project will be finished.

City officials say the home builders are within their rights to make noise. As long as they have the proper permits and work between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m., they can go on building forever.

It is a case, the bureaucrats say, that strikes at the heart of people’s rights to enjoy their own property at the possible expense of their neighbors.

Recently, hand-tied officials advised Shaner to file a civil lawsuit against the construction firm, an option she calls “the great American solution” and refuses to consider.

Instead, she insists on pressing City Hall to help solve her back-yard nightmare.

“The attitude is that I live in La Jolla, and so I can afford to sue,” she said. “But we also pay some pretty high taxes in this area, money that pays for those city officials to work for us.

“So why should I pay twice? It’s like buying the cow and then going out to buy the milk. Anyway, the judge is going to tell me: ‘Go away, you foolish woman. You’ve already got your equal rights to enjoy your property guaranteed under the Constitution. So what are you suing for?’ ”

Shaner, a veteran sorter of government red tape in the six countries om which she has lived--the others are Spain, France, Australia and Japan--has used a stiff upper lip and a sometimes sharp sense of humor to make her point with bureaucrats over the years.

That humor is still at play in San Diego, despite the noise.

Although they insist they have done all they can, city officials acknowledge that Shaner’s sheer persistence--her regular phone calls and a recent package in which she sent her family’s alarm clock to the city--has piqued their interest in the case.

“Mrs. Shaner has a wonderful sense of humor,” said Susan Quinn, a dispute resolution coordinator contracted by the city. “Our phone conversations are always a combination of laughter and tears.”

The property owners doing the building in Shaner’s neighborhood see it differently. Even at the city’s request, they have refused to sit down and talk with Shaner about the project.

“I won’t mediate with her,” said Joseph Segal, who identified himself as a partner in West Coast Development Corp., listed on city building permit records as both owner and builder of the property in the 300 block of Fern Glenn.

“She’s a very crude, obnoxious lady who uses four-letter words, and I’m not going to subject myself to it. I prefer not to communicate with her. From the day the job started, I became her enemy. She’s turned me in to every agency she can think of.

“Now that she’s run out of city officials, she wants to sit down and talk. Well, that’s too bad.”

Shaner, however, isn’t the only neighbor fed up with the noise.

Jane Gary, who lives next door to the Shaners, said she also has approached the builder, with no satisfaction.

“Construction is acceptable,” she said. “But this constant racket is insane. These people are just being so inconsiderate with the noise. And it just goes on and on.

“I mean, I’ve seen whole houses go up in six or seven months. But not with these people. They’re not builders, they’re putterers.”

The complaints from residents have added to the neighborhood tension, Gary said. In July, West Coast Development sued her for $30,000 because of tree branches that hung over a fence, dropping leaves into the yard.

“It’s come down to harassment of each other, really,” Gary said. “But Maureen isn’t one to be sat upon. She’s vowed to fight this thing.”

So Shaner continues to call city officials once a week, just to let them know that both she and her noise problem are still alive and well. And she has dreamed up a few other ways to get their attention.

One afternoon, for example, she used a portable phone to call the city from her noisy back-yard property line. A voice told Shaner that she would have to speak up, that she could not be heard above the racket.

Last week, she mailed her alarm clock--set at 7:21 a.m.--to the city’s noise abatement office, along with a letter describing how the rest of her family have also discarded their clocks.

“They became totally redundant,” she wrote, “as we could confidently rely on (the builder) and his merry band of men to do the job for us. . . . I bought the clock hoping it would give me the sense that I was in charge of my life.

“After all, this is America, and I foolishly thought I could rise from my bed when I chose. . . . Please educate me and point the way, so that I too can gain the equal right to enjoy my little piece of property. Do I have to get a permit? Perhaps a sex change operation would help.

“Maybe that is a bit drastic, but I am at my wit’s end. My tolerance, patience and humor is now down to a fine line.”

Frank Hafner, the city’s building code and noise abatement supervisor, said he would gladly shut down the noise if any city codes were being violated. But, since the builder is within his rights, his hands are tied, he said.

“I can make life miserable for someone who is breaking city codes, but, in this case, no rules whatsoever are being broken,” he said. “It’s difficult to be effective in an area where we have no strength.

“We deal with thousands of noise complaints. But there are a few, such as Mrs. Shaner’s, that go right off the bell curve. She is experiencing a level of frustration that few people experience when they deal with us.”

Part of her frustration, Shaner said, is that she has witnessed the way other cultures--especially the Japanese--have dealt more effectively with noise problems.

There, whole families can live in a small apartment but, through sheer tact and courtesy, give each other the impression of privacy, she said.

“That’s why I’m mad,” she said. “I’ve seen enough of the world to know that this isn’t right. In Japan, where all those people inhabit such a little place, they’ve learned to care about each other, to respect each other’s personal space.

“But that’s not what’s happening here. These people aren’t even neighbors. They’re developers, they don’t live at the address. They don’t care about peace in the neighborhood.”

The construction job started in the fall of 1985, Shaner said, when workers began building what she describes as an elaborate model of an Indonesian temple with a foreboding wooden tower. Within months, she said, the project became the talk of the neighborhood.

“These people call themselves artists,” she said of the builders. “They say they’re creating a work of art. Well, how would you like to live next door to Leonardo da Vinci for four years straight?”

Segal, who said he may inhabit the structure upon completion, said the project is not a temple at all but “a magnificent house that will be better than anything in San Diego because we’re paying attention to every detail.”

He said the workers have made no more noise “than the average lawn mower” and that Shaner has held up the project by her constant intrusions. For example, he said, her complaints to the city forced him to move his construction trailer from the property, and he now must haul in new building materials every day.

“She’s mad because she thinks I’ve infringed on her territory,” he said. “But we just cannot live in this type of tender environment. People make noise. This is just a very narrow little lady.”

Anyway, quality craftsmanship takes time, Segal said. The project, which he said was begun about three years ago, will be finished when the work is done. “When the good Lord permits it to happen,” he said, “that’s when it’ll be done.”

According to city records, the building permit for the property was first issued to West Coast Development in September, 1986. The plans called for a two-story addition to a single-family residence, including at least two baths and a maid’s quarters.

Neighbors say, however, that the noise has gone on longer than three years because the workers spent at least a year tearing down the previous structure before they were granted the building permit.

So Shaner has continued to root around City Hall, looking for answers. “The only way to deal with a bureaucracy is through persistence,” she said. “You can’t get mad at them, or they’ll tune you out and you’ll never get anywhere.

“And you’ve got to do your research. Because, with bureaucrats, you’ve got to know the answers before you ask the questions. Dealing with the bureaucratic system is a lesson in lunacy.”

Meanwhile, the noise plays on. And the weeds grow in Maureen Shaner’s garden.

“I came to America for all your rights,” she said. “Well, they talk about civil rights and equal rights here, but there’s no sense to it, it’s all just bloody words.

“But I’ve learned that persistence pays off. I’m Irish, and I’m stubborn, and I’m mad. And I’m not going away.”