DANA POINT : Roof Puts the Lid on Couple’s Sea View

The Link family has a problem that’s common in coastal Southern California.

Three years after Lowell and Penny Link bought their dream home on a Dana Point hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, they found a new roofline poking skyward between their living room window and the blue water.

“We bought for location and we bought for view,” said Lowell Link, 58, a San Clemente-based real estate agent. “Now all we have is location.”

The steeply pitched roof belongs to a $750,000, 6,500-square-foot sewer district operations building under construction across the street from the Links’ home in the Village at Dana Point development.

They had been told it would be a one-story building, but not that its roof would rise 26 feet, high enough to cut off their treasured blue-water view, the sailboats on the horizon and the picturesque old Pacific Coast Highway bridge over San Juan Creek.

The frustrated Links have made belated appeals to the city and the sewer district and gotten little response, other than a suggestion that it’s too late to make any alterations. Construction has been underway for three months.

“I talked to the city and they said I need to talk to the sewer district,” Link said. “When I talked to the sewer district they said talk to the city.”

City officials said they notified all property owners within 500 feet of the project and the Links’ neighbors did attend planning commission meetings, voicing concerns over landscaping to screen the sewer treatment basins, city officials said.

Alex Bowie, attorney for the sewer district, the Southeast Regional Reclamation Authority, said that since the roof is up, it is too late for the SERRA board to spend public funds to alter it.

“I think all we can do is say we are very sorry,” Bowie told the Links at a recent sewer board meeting. “I would like to be able to say something more comforting.”

The Links are considering hiring an attorney, said Lowell Link. “What else can we do?”