Tree Tiff Keeps on Growing

Gina McClure looked out her bedroom window last month and saw three men armed with chain saws standing on top of her backyard fence.

“I started screaming. My son started crying. It was like an invasion,” McClure said.

The invaders were tree trimmers hired by a homeowners association to hack McClure’s Italian cypresses. Thus began a dispute over “privacy barriers” that grew into a battle over control in the master planned community.

Over the last decade, the McClures’ 27 Italian cypress trees had grown to nearly 18 feet tall, providing privacy and a buffer to the traffic whizzing by on Antonio Parkway. The trees weren’t blocking anyone’s view and hadn’t drawn a neighbor’s complaint.

But since mid-1993, the McClures and the community’s homeowners association have been arguing over the height of the trees and terms such as “privacy barriers” and whether the “tree to tree” span should be the distance between trunks or branches.

“It’s been a nightmare,” said McClure, a mother of two and a part-time law student at Western State University College of Law. “I wonder if it will ever end.”

The homeowners association says much the same about McClure and her trees. They’ve done everything, they say, to try to make her happy, even offering to plant additional trees between the parkway and her home if only she would keep the trees at 10 feet.

“She’s making a big stink about this,” said Lesly Martin of Merit Property Management Co.

The standoff ended last month when the association sent in tree trimmers, who began hacking the trees to just over 7 feet.

“I couldn’t believe my eyes, all the damage they were doing to these beautiful trees,” McClure said recently as she sat on the patio in her tidy backyard.

What happened next, however, is in dispute.

McClure claims that after 10 trees had been cut, she hurled a slipper at one of the tree trimmers but did not hurt him. Martin, however, claims McClure used a “heavy object” to strike a worker, who fell and needed stitches.

McClure dialed 911, and deputies from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department halted the work, leaving a hodgepodge of towering and stunted trees.

Now McClure has filed a small claims complaint in Municipal Court in Laguna Niguel against the homeowners association, seeking more than $6,000 in damages. A hearing is set for July 9.

McClure contends she will prevail because there were no height standards in effect when she planted the trees, and therefore that later rules should not apply.

“This is a tree community; we’re all about trees,” she said.

Rancho Santa Margarita resident Gary S. Thompson, vice president of the homeowners association, said many other residents also have received warnings to cut back foliage, but only McClure’s case has spiraled out of control.

“We were looking for a solution here, but they weren’t interested,” he said.

The McClures and others blame the escalation on the five-member homeowners association, the closest thing to a city council in this unincorporated community.

Three of the board members do not live in Rancho Santa Margarita, but can be elected to the board by residents because they work for the RSM Management Co., the master developer for the community.

“People who don’t live here shouldn’t tell us how to live,” said community activist Michelle Lamb, who adds that outsiders may be uncaring about the community. But Dan Kelly, a Laguna Beach resident who sits on the association board, disagreed.

“I take exception to that,” said Kelly, vice president of government relations at RSM Management Co. “If people are dissatisfied, they can just vote us out.”

In the meantime, McClure insists she will not budge to protect her trees. “I’m not going to let them do this to me,” she said.