Builder Tells Owners of Disputed Laguna Niguel Homes They’re Safe : Development: Taylor Woodrow president vows to protect ownership titles and predicts council will drop suit to reclaim land.

Taylor Woodrow President Gordon Tippell assured more than 100 concerned Marina Hills residents Wednesday evening that their homes were safe despite threatened legal action by the Laguna Niguel City Council to reclaim the property on which their houses are built.

“I think its all hypothetical,” Tippell said, adding that when the City Council “fully understands the evidence” it will drop its move to take legal action against the company.

Residents asked Tippell and Larry Buster, an attorney for First American Title Insurance Co., if there was any way they could lose their homes or if they would have any problems if they tried to sell them.

Buster emphatically said his company would protect the ownership title of those living in the development. He said not only would the company protect current owners, but also prospective buyers.

Tippell assured homeowners that his plan for the area provided as much open space and parks as the plan proposed by the former developer. Tippell said the only difference was that his plan called for more parks and ball fields.

But Marina Hills resident Carole Taylor challenged Tippell’s claim. Taylor complained that while the old plan provided two large areas of open space, the Taylor Woodrow plan provided piecemeal strips of open space between developments.

“I see you even counted (as) open space the swimming pool,” Taylor said. “Are you saying you (could have had) house after house after house?”

Wednesday’s meeting was called by the developer to quiet any concerns that residents might have had since learning in recent weeks that a 96-acre section of Marina Hills is the subject of investigation by the Orange County district attorney’s office.

Investigators are trying to determine how the land, once deeded by a previous developer to the county for use as open space, ended up being given to Taylor Woodrow Homes by Laguna Niguel officials. With an estimated development value of as much as $70 million, the property now holds 100 houses and more are under construction.

The deed to Taylor Woodrow Homes was signed in 1988 by James F. Krembas, then a member of the Laguna Niguel Community Services District and now a city councilman. Krembas, a focus of the investigation in part because his wife went to work for the developer three months after the transaction, has said that he signed the deed in the mistaken belief that it involved a smaller parcel that had been approved by the district board.

News of the investigation prompted the City Council to vote last week to mount a legal drive to void the 1988 transaction. And the city manager was directed to investigate the actions of James S. Mocalis, then-manager of the services district, and former district attorney James S. Okazaki. Both men also signed the deed, and say they did nothing improper.

Laguna Niguel City Atty. Terry Earl Dixon said Wednesday that whatever legal action the city takes against Taylor Woodrow Homes, it would not affect houses that are already built or home buyers who have invested money in houses that are only partially complete.

Executives with Taylor Woodrow Homes also say the transaction was entirely legal and had been approved by county officials. They also contend that, even with houses on the disputed 96 acres, Marina Hills has a better parks and open-space plan than its previous developer had planned.

At a Planning Commission meeting Tuesday, Jeff Prostor, project manager of Marina Hills, told commissioners that the firm has provided 65 acres of open space and 35 acres of parks. Even land once approved as the site of a condominium project is now a park, he said.

But Councilman Paul Christiansen disputes the firm’s figures and says that in any case Taylor Woodrow failed to go through the proper city channels for changing the boundary of parks and open space.

Christiansen said most of the 35 acres of parkland that Taylor Woodrow said it created in its building plan has yet to be received--and has never been reviewed--by city officials. Christiansen said much of the open space that the developer is claiming has been set aside for the public is small strips of undevelopable land surrounding the planned community.

“Open space means open space,” Christiansen said. “It doesn’t mean space split up with homes and roads and fire hydrants.”