O.C. Running Short of High-Quality Parkland : Land-use: County supervisors allowed developers to set aside unusable land for parks and to pay fees far less than needed to develop adequate recreation facilities.

A year ago, officials here went out to inspect the parkland that Orange County transferred to Mission Viejo as it was approaching cityhood. What they found was not all suitable for tot lots or ball diamonds.

There were oddly shaped parcels of land winding up hillsides and plunging into ravines. One 15-acre “park” consisted of an acre of flat land and 14 acres of vertical slopes surrounding two huge water tanks.

“Sure, I’d like to have more usable flat land and space for ball fields,” said Jim E. Ball, a Mission Viejo parks consultant. “But that’s not the reality.”

Mission Viejo, it turns out, is not alone.

Orange County--despite its roster of large regional parks--is significantly short of local, neighborhood parkland. The shortage comes despite the county’s passage 20 years ago of a law that originally required builders to leave behind 2.5 acres of local parkland for every 1,000 new residents to be generated by their developments.

Records reviewed by The Times and interviews with planning experts show that Orange County’s unincorporated neighborhoods have only 72% of the local park acreage they should under the park-dedication law. Because much of that acreage is unimproved or inaccessible, there is an actual 40% shortage of local parkland usable for recreation.

As evidenced recently in Laguna Niguel--where the district attorney is continuing to investigate how and why 96 acres of open space was relinquished to a developer--decisions affecting public lands can erupt in controversy.

But more often the determinations of which lands will be accepted as public parks go unnoticed to all but a few insiders, stamping permanent imprints on communities already enduring traffic gridlock and other fallout from a swelling suburban population.

The Times has found that Orange County’s park policies and decisions have helped create this region’s shortage of local parkland. For example:

* The county has at times allowed developers “to fulfill their (park) requirements by dedication of marginally suitable lands” that are unusable for either recreation or profitable housing construction, according to a December, 1989, report to the Board of Supervisors from the county Environmental Management Agency. That same report documented the county’s 28% to 40% shortage of local parkland.

* For most of the 1980s, fees that developers could pay instead of setting aside parkland were based on outdated and below-market land valuations. For instance, as land values boomed toward $1 million an acre, the county based its fees until mid-1985 on the assumption that land was worth $28,000 an acre, documents show. Consequently, the county lost its opportunity to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars that would have been spent directly on purchasing parkland and converting existing undeveloped lands into usable recreation areas.

* Since 1985, county officials have let developers satisfy their parkland requirements by erecting private recreation facilities that are off-limits to the public, records show. And, developers have been given local parkland credit for dedicating landscaping at entrances to planned communities.

The 1989 report also concluded that Orange County’s 2.5-acre park standard has been “virtually impossible to achieve.” The report made two recommendations to county supervisors that “would result in creating more public parkland”: Raise the park-dedication requirement to 3 acres and force more developers to give land instead of paying fees.

Neither recommendation has been implemented.

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose district encompasses Laguna Niguel and other South County communities, said he is wary of imposing higher restrictions or costs on developers when the county establishes park-related policies and fees.

“That gives me problems,” Riley said, adding that higher costs for developers mean higher costs for prospective home buyers. “I know it goes into the housing costs,” he said. “The costs go up. . . . The cost of housing is something I have to consider.”

Clearly, parkland decisions carry huge stakes for developers and residents:

Land in Orange County--some of Southern California’s last developable coastal real estate--is occasionally worth up to $1 million an acre. The parkland dedications, required by county and city ordinances, affect developers who often are politically influential. Yet without the developers’ dedications and fees, significant acquisitions of parkland are usually beyond the reach of local governments in this post-tax-revolt era of limited budgets and prohibitive land prices.

Said Warren S. Benson, a former city manager in Laguna Niguel: “Once those decisions are made and the parkland is dedicated--or if (the county or a city) doesn’t get the land--it is lost, forever. And the community is never going to regain it. . . . It’s very significant.”

Ask Susan Penney, who has been battling for years to get baseball fields and other play areas for children in Laguna Niguel. When she headed a local Little League in 1987, about 100 boys and girls were turned away because of a lack of fields. The situation, Penney said, remains unsatisfactory.

“I think a lot of things happened that were contrary to what the residents wanted,” Penney said. “Now we’ve got the congestion, the density, the shortage of playing fields. . . . The county did all of the negotiating (with the developers) and all the planning. Who else is responsible?

“This is supposed to be a planned community,” Penney continued. “By the time the pressure (for adequate parkland) was extended here at the local level, the open, flat land was gone.”

That conclusion is buttressed by a detailed inventory of Laguna Niguel’s parkland. The study, completed in November, 1989, one month before Laguna Niguel incorporated as a city, found that the town has less than half the usable parkland it should.

“Laguna Niguel currently has a parkland deficit of 59.21 acres (out of 105.50 called for by the county law),” according to the Laguna Niguel Park and Recreation Master Plan, prepared by the municipal government’s staff and outside consultants. “At build-out, even after all proposed parks are developed and all offered parks are accepted, (Laguna Niguel) will be 44.22 acres short” of the county’s minimum standard.

For their part, Laguna Niguel leaders have not suffered the shortage silently.

One of the most bitterly contested protests of the county’s stewardship of Laguna Niguel centered on park-related decisions affecting a planned community developed by the Buie Corp. of San Diego. Laguna Niguel officials contend that the county granted parkland credit to Buie, leaving residents short of the land or related fees they deserved.

Based on a planning consultant’s April, 1988, study, officials of the Laguna Niguel Community Services District contended that Buie’s Rancho Niguel development fell about 25% short of its parkland requirement. The consultant’s report said, in part, that Buie’s park-dedication documents were “incomplete, questionable and conflicting.”

Buie disagreed, noting that county officials had already approved its development plans.

On May 2, 1988, the county Planning Commission voted to deny the Laguna Niguel service district’s request to withdraw Buie’s park dedication. And the Board of Supervisors subsequently upheld the Planning Commission.

“It was very significant to us,” recalled Benson, then Laguna Niguel’s top staff executive. “Buie had come in with what we considered to be a complete change in the development. . . . The CSD was not consulted, not advised, and we had to live with the consequences--the county giving Buie more (park) credit than I think they deserved. . . . All of that was approved by administrative act, by the county, and it didn’t go through the hearing process.”

Robert F. Buie, president of the Buie Corp., said Laguna Niguel leaders wanted more than his company was required to give, under Orange County park law and policies.

“The (Laguna Niguel) CSD said, ‘We want a Rolls-Royce.’ And the county regulations said we needed to give an Olds or a Buick,” Buie said.

Buie acknowledged that his company has been a force in Orange County politics--giving a total of $4,700 to the election campaigns of Supervisors Riley, Gaddi H. Vasquez and Roger R. Stanton in 1985 and 1987, records show. Buie said he felt his company “had an obligation under the system” to help the officeholders it supported.

Buie also did not dispute that, early on, the Buie Corp. indicated that it preferred having its developments overseen by Orange County officials, as opposed to leaders in Laguna Niguel.

In late 1986, when proponents of cityhood in Laguna Niguel were beginning to seek incorporation, the Buie Corp. distributed an anonymous flyer warning residents: “Consider these questions BEFORE you sign the incorporation petition: Will incorporation lead to higher taxes? Do we need or can we afford a new level of Bureaucracy? Will there be a reduction in Community Services?”

John C. Bulleit, a retired resident who pressed Buie to ultimately concede in a press release that it issued the flyer, said that the company’s opposition to incorporation was not unique.

“Any developer who was aggressive and had definite plans for carving up the hills of Laguna Niguel certainly understood that one of the reasons for incorporation was to put greater restrictions on development,” Bulleit said in an interview.

Tract by tract, individual parkland dedications can be dwarfed in scope by other needs, such as getting developers to help pay for adequate roadways. Indeed, the technical decisions affecting park dedications--often made years earlier by county officials--make it tough to pin down whether a newly incorporating community has gotten its rightful share.

“Those park modifications are convoluted,” said Clint Sherrod, Mission Viejo’s planning director. “It’s difficult to audit them, if you were not familiar with the transactions that took place.”

Eric Jessen, the park and open-space specialist for the county, acknowledged that in many South County areas, “there’s a horrendous deficiency of ball fields.”

But Jessen said that when county-operated regional parks are taken into account, both Laguna Niguel and Mission Viejo are “very generously endowed” with open space or parkland.

Jessen added: “It’s real easy for the new people on the block to criticize their forerunners. . . . We’re very proud of what we’ve done with the local parks.”

Jessen said some local planners, responding to the desires of residents, have been “obsessed with new ball fields.”

Although he would like to see more of those facilities, Jessen said he has supported granting developers credit toward their local-park requirement when they dedicate more remote acreages that can provide look-out vistas or preserve native plant species and wildlife habitats.

And Orange County’s park ordinance and related policies do allow officials to use wide discretion in evaluating the quality of local parkland that developers may dedicate. For instance, the county Planning Commission, “in unusual circumstances . . . may approve linear configurations or oddly shaped parcels of land” offered by developers as local park sites, county policy states.

One example occurred in Laguna Niguel, where, Jessen acknowledged, he supported the Hon Development Co.’s dedication in 1986 of 48 acres of inaccessible slope and brushland, perhaps valuable as a plant and animal corridor but unusable for recreation. A rigid application of the county’s 2.5 acres per 1,000 residents standard would have required Hon to dedicate 12 acres of local parkland, as opposed to the 48 acres of open space.

What then, is a “local park”?

Orange County’s park dedication ordinance provides this definition:

“A parcel . . . which provides recreational land and facilities for the benefit and enjoyment of the residents and visitors of Orange County.”

The 1965 state law that authorizes local governments to require local park dedications, called the Quimby Act, says the land is intended “for neighborhood and community park or recreational purposes.”

Jessen, although proud of his department’s overall park stewardship, acknowledged that Orange County has not gotten all the parkland it could have.

For instance, with one exception, park-related concerns were not up for discussion when Orange County’s top planning officials and the Board of Supervisors approved 18 major development agreements in late 1987 and early 1988, according to Jessen and others.

The development agreements, covering about 65,000 housing units, were sought by developers worried about an initiative promoting slower growth that was to appear on the June, 1988, ballot. The initiative was defeated.

“We did not have very much input in the development agreements,” Jessen said. “I was disappointed. We just weren’t involved in the negotiations. We had very little participation. Virtually none.

“Believe you me, I had some ideas about what we could get. It was a very important time in the county’s history--a golden opportunity to do some good things.”

Developer FEES: County used outmoded land values to assess charges. A24

PARK POLICY: A tough Anaheim law guarantees usable land. A25