NEWS ANALYSIS : Fears of Slow-Growthers Come True in Land Shuffle

When Orange County supervisors took up a host of development agreements in early 1988, four months before a heavily favored slow-growth initiative was scheduled to appear on the ballot, local environmentalists howled in protest.

The haste to lock in permits would result in mistakes and rob the public of potential benefits, they argued. Their pleas to delay action were ignored: In a heated session on Feb. 10, 1988, the supervisors shrugged off threats of lawsuits and accusations that they were playing into the hands of developers. They passed three of the agreements, which locked in the developers’ plans in return for their pledge to make transportation improvements and guarantee other public benefits.

One of those agreements covered the Marina Hills planned community developed by Taylor Woodrow Homes California Ltd.

This week, after the embarrassing revelation that about 99 acres of land that had been set aside for parks wound up in the hands of Taylor Woodrow Homes and now has 100 houses on some of them, it was hard for those same activists to keep from crowing.

“You hate to say I told you so,” said Tom Rogers, a San Juan Capistrano slow-growth activist and longtime critic of the supervisors, “but we had worried about just this kind of thing happening. It’s typical of what happened in those days, when they were rushing through the development agreements before the slow-growth measure got passed.”

The land transfer was approved Feb. 12, 1988--two days after the development agreements were approved by the board--and it was signed by the then-vice president of Laguna Niguel’s Community Services District, James F. Krembas.

Now a Laguna Niguel city councilman, Krembas is under investigation by the Orange County district attorney but has said that he signed the deed to the property by mistake, believing incorrectly that it covered only a much smaller land swap between the district and Taylor Woodrow Homes.

Instead, Taylor Woodrow wound up with 99 acres next to Salt Creek Corridor Regional Park. The land, once designated as a future park, is chockablock with quarter-million-dollar homes.

The transaction came to light Thursday, and it has rekindled the 1988 development debate that engulfed the county at the time, pitting environmentalists and slow-growth activists against developers in a fevered disagreement about how the county should plan for its future. At issue was the pace of county construction and the fear that developers would gobble up the last remaining chunks of undisturbed terrain.

The environmentalists’ response to the building boom was a slow-growth initiative that would have linked future growth with the ability of local roads and public services to handle increased workloads. That measure sent the development community into a whirlwind response, as builders tried to lock in their permits before the initiative went to voters.

The measure was eventually defeated, a stunning upset largely credited to the political work of Gordon Tippell, Taylor Woodrow Homes’ president and at the time an official with the local Building Industry Assn.

But in February, 1988, when the board was considering the development agreements, few would have foreseen the slow-growth measure’s eventual defeat. A Times poll published three days before the vote found that 58% of county residents supported the measure, and developers were frantic.

“I can tell you as a developer that everybody was in a rush,” said Jim Olmsted, a development consultant who is now chairman of the Laguna Niguel Planning Commission. “Nobody knew what was going to happen. The developers were trying to protect their interests, but the flip side of that is: Why were these agreements rushed through so quickly by the county?”

County officials are not thought to be the focus of the investigation, although the district attorney is reviewing the work of county staff members as it relates to the land transfer. Still, local officials and environmentalists said they consider the county’s actions very much at issue.

“I don’t think this can be brushed off as a mistake,” said Cindy O’Neal, a longtime Laguna Niguel community activist who protested the development agreement for that area when it was approved in 1988. “There is nearly 100 acres of parkland that has somehow become a residential development. You can’t just toss that off.”

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district includes Laguna Niguel and who made the motion to approve Taylor Woodrow Homes’ development agreement during the 1988 session, declined to respond to the criticisms.

“There’s a lot of things going on, and there’s a lot of people pointing fingers, but I’m going to wait until the facts are in,” he said Saturday. “We need to figure out exactly what happened.”

Supervisor Don R. Roth and aides to other supervisors have suggested that the board cannot be held responsible for minute details of actions it takes regarding development agreements or zoning changes. The board reviews more than 100 items on a typical weekly agenda and as a result leaves most of the detail work to staff members.

But critics take little comfort in that reasoning.

“If (supervisors) don’t read what they’re signing, they have no right to sign those documents,” Olmsted said. “I find this all amazing.”

Rogers was even more strident: “This is a tragedy. And it was the county’s job to keep it from happening. They’ve got the staff, they’ve got the expertise, so why didn’t they take care of this land?”