SAN JUAN CAPISTRANO : Residents Are Upset by Removal of Trees

On her way home recently from a trip to the fire-ravaged hills of Santa Barbara, Debra Ashley gave thanks that her own home, with its view of towering eucalyptus trees, would still be waiting for her.

But when she returned, she found that all but a few of the 100-foot trees beyond her back-yard gate had been torn out and that the outlying field was filled with churning bulldozers, sending rumblings like those at the beginning of a medium-sized earthquake through her house.

“We thought we could go home and still have our trees, but when we got here, everything was gone. Our homes are literally shaking every day. My son hasn’t taken a nap in a month,” Ashley said.

Ashley and her neighbors on Briarwood Lane in the Village San Juan Capistrano housing tract claim they were never directly notified about the earthmoving project, part of a plan to build an extra parking lot for Capistrano Valley High School on a nearby slope.

As part of a deal with the Capistrano Unified School District, the Mission Viejo Co. is grading a former RV storage lot below the high school and using the dirt to build a tiered parking lot against the slope descending from the high school.

Representatives from the Mission Viejo Co. overseeing the grading said that the eucalyptus grove had to be removed to grade the outer portions of the lot.

“The trees were in the way, so we took them out, but we kept all the ones we could,” said Wendy Wetzel. “They’re not endangered. They’ll grow back, and it’s our property.”

But residents said they would have protested removal of the trees had they been informed of public meetings held in June. The hearings were advertised in a newspaper delivered only to Mission Viejo residents, and the only other notification given was a sign posted at the high school site nearly half a mile away.

“I’m really sorry it happened this way, but they were legally notified,” said Karl Krebs, director of facilities planning for Capistrano Unified School District.

Under guidelines of the California Environmental Quality Act, the sign at the high school site was the only notification needed, Krebs said.

But residents charged that school district officials should have notified the president of the Village San Juan Homeowners’ Assn. about the project. Instead, Capistrano Valley High School Principal Thomas Anthony notified the high school’s PTA president, Krebs said, because she happened to be a resident of the complex.

Village residents and school district officials will meet Friday August 10 to iron out discuss their differences and landscaping suggestions for the high school parking lot, due to open this fall.