City Park Is Barrier to Community Gates : Neighborhoods: Suit challenges plan to enclose homes, saying it limits access to public property.

El Niguel Heights wants only what 12 other exclusive housing developments already have in this pricey South County community--guards and automated gates.

The problem is, Seminole Park sits within the tract. And the little grassy patch with a playground belongs to the public.

A group of Laguna Niguel residents have filed a suit in Orange County Superior Court against the El Niguel Heights Homeowners’ Assn., contending that gates and guards would block access to the park and, in effect, be a confiscation of public property.

“Nobody is against gating private property. It’s when public property is gated that we have a problem,” said Paul Christiansen, a former city councilman and co-founder of a group trying to halt what members see as a national trend toward gating public parks and trails.

“For a security guard to monitor who uses a public park we feel is against the American way,” Christiansen, of Park Access Restoration Committee (PARC), said.

However, the majority of El Niguel Heights residents who overwhelmingly voted in the spring of 1994 for the gates call the park issue a red herring.

At the city’s insistence, they have agreed to offer public access to the two-acre park from dawn to dusk and to pay an extra $50 monthly fee per homeowner for maintaining the park and the streets within El Niguel Heights.

“Anybody who wants to use the park can use it,” said Gary Moorhead, an attorney and a member of the association’s board of directors. “Unless somebody wants to go to the park at 3 a.m., which we don’t want to encourage, they will have access.”

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The problem surfaced more than a year ago when the association applied for permission to install gates at its two entrances.

Eighteen-year-old El Niguel Heights, where the 250 homes range from $350,000 to $550,000, sits on a hilltop about two miles from the Pacific Ocean, and residents enjoy sweeping views of the twin Saddleback peaks and tony El Niguel Country Club.

Gates would bring El Niguel Heights not only extra security but also much greater property values, Moorhead said, pointing out that nearly every neighboring development already is gated.

“We are competing with neighborhoods directly adjacent to our community which are gate-guarded and whose property values are substantially higher than ours,” said Moorhead, who has lived in the neighborhood for 13 years. “That’s in a large part due to the gates.”

The desire to live behind gates is becoming increasingly fashionable throughout the nation, where an estimated 4 million people live in gate-guarded communities.

But adding gates to an established community, like El Niguel Heights, is provoking costly lawsuits pitting one neighbor against another.

In one celebrated case in the historic Hollywood Hills enclave of Whitley Heights, a neighborhood east of the Hollywood Bowl, residents were forced to dismantle the gates and pay legal fees--a combined cost of more than $300,000--after neighbors charged that the gates prevented people from using public streets.

The city of Laguna Niguel has tried to sidestep that issue by requiring El Niguel Heights to privatize the streets within their boundaries, Laguna Niguel City Manager Tim Casey said.

The city has drafted guidelines for all communities seeking gates that include not only privatizing the streets but also ensuring public access to any parks or public areas inside their boundaries, Casey said.

Among the reasons the city saw fit to approve the gates was that Seminole Park was designed to be a neighborhood park, little more than a grassy knoll with a play area for children, Casey said. There are no public facilities, no outdoor lights, no drinking fountains or bathrooms.

“Seminole Park was dedicated many moons ago to meet the park code requirements for the El Niguel Heights subdivision,” Casey said. “It was never intended for anything other than a neighborhood-serving park.”

“The homeowners’ association must provide public access, unrestricted, during normal daylight hours,” Casey said. “People must be able to drive a car in, walk in, bike in or park adjacent to the parksite and enjoy it. . . . We tried to balance the two issues: the desire to add gates and public access.”

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Meanwhile, the gates themselves have loomed as an issue for some residents here.

El Niguel Heights homeowner Jim Davis, a former association board member, claims to be among a growing number of neighbors who have soured on the whole gate concept.

He contends that the ultimate costs will be more than $50 a month and that there are too many gated communities popping up.

“Where do you stop with these gates?” asked Davis, 68, a member of PARC who is retired from the Army and a banking career. “We get gated and then the next community gets gated.

“Pretty soon it will be like the Balkans, where every group starts its own country and says, ‘You stay out of mine.’ I can see there being a gate every 500 yards in town.”