ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Toppling Trees, and Harmony

People move to Orange County for various reasons: schools, jobs, the suburban lifestyle. And they pick their houses for various reasons: the ocean, nearby parks, mountain vistas.

Within Laguna Niguel’s 151-home condominium association called Potomac Landing, the folks on the top of the hill picked their units for the ocean views, and paid an extra $100,000 or so for the seascape. Residents on the lower levels loved the eucalyptus trees, which provided shade, privacy and something for children to climb. The problem was that the trees grew to heights of 30 feet and blocked the ocean views.

This week the association’s recently elected board of directors--arguing that besides blocking the views the trees were expensive to tend and posed a fire hazard--hired a tree service that felled 200 of them. The action provoked a furor. One homeowner brandished a shotgun--he said it was unloaded--at the tree cutters. Neighbors quarreled bitterly. Sheriff’s deputies were called.

The board’s decision to cut the trees was reached in a closed-door meeting, a foolish way to decide matters affecting hundreds of people. Homeowners are concerned about not just the economics of their major investment; they are emotionally attached to the place they call their own. Condominium boards often find it difficult to win majority approval for anything controversial, but they nonetheless must discuss troublesome issues publicly. Secret decisions just fuel the anger of those on the losing side.

The larger lesson is that while people may move to Potomac Landing and other communities in a search for a piece of paradise, they often find the problems that are common to people almost everywhere, like the need to get along with the neighbors.

Poet Joyce Kilmer wrote that “only God can make a tree.” The homeowners found out what can happen when chain saws cut trees down. Acacia saplings have been promised to replace the eucalyptus. It will take them a long time to be fully grown. May the bad feelings among neighbors heal long before.