Growing Signs of Change

They knew the project was for real when the bulldozers came for the pepper trees.

For years, residents in west Yorba Linda have been fighting a proposed 2,100-home development on Shell Oil Co. land in the Chino Hills. Though parts of the 5,000-acre tract are still producing oil, many areas are picturesque hillsides and knots of cactus and willowy 50-year-old trees that house endangered songbirds. And neighbors don’t want that to change.

“We have sat in our backyard and seen the hawks overhead and watched the skunks come walking through our yard,” said 12-year resident Bev Preston, 57. “It’s like we’re alone up here with nature all around, and we’d like it to stay that way.”

City Councilman John M. Gullixson said residents were naive if they expected never to see houses on the private open space next to them. He pointed out that the city annexed the Shell land because officials knew it was going to be developed and wanted to have input in the design, which has yet to go before the Planning Commission.

“These people knew that was going to be developed eventually. Everybody knew,” he said. “It’s unrealistic to think the moment you move in we should gate off the city and not let anybody else in.”

For seven years, Shell and the city have negotiated over the project, which officials from Shell and the builder, Toll Brothers Inc., say will take 25 years to complete. The bulldozing of the trees seemed to signal that construction was imminent, but now there is another obstacle, one that involves a road not even on Shell property.

If a November ballot initiative passes, it would halt widening of Imperial Highway within the city. Though Shell officials say that would not affect their project, residents and some council members fear the combination of thousands of new residents and a narrow Imperial Highway will bring nightmarish traffic.

So the city staff is working on an environmental report to see if those fears are warranted. But Shell officials say they have met every requirement to date and complain that a new report would delay their project unfairly for as long as six months.

The skirmish over the pepper trees is a microcosm of the war over development in a city that many residents say they cherish for its semirural nature and for a lifestyle that they fear may be vanishing.

Nearly everyone on Chicago Avenue had the same reaction Jan. 27 when they saw the bulldozers moving toward the grove.

“I wanted to run over there and throw myself in front of them,” said Cynthia Shepard, who moved to Yorba Linda last year.

Even though the trees were gone, residents complained at subsequent City Council meetings that Shell did not have a city permit to remove the trees and that the company was thumbing its nose at the community.

Shell officials responded that they had a federal permit to grade the land and remove the trees, nonnative species once planted to shade oil workers. And they had to pull the trees before Feb. 15 or risk disturbing nests of endangered California gnatcatchers.

Attorneys for the city and Shell are still debating the issue. Gullixson said they may agree to some mitigation--such as having Shell plant 50 trees somewhere else on its property.

The loss of the trees still galls people such as Pat Nelson, who said they were part of the rustic setting she was seeking when she came to Chicago Avenue in 1979.

“When we moved in here, there was a flock of sheep that came by the house every afternoon,” Nelson, 47, said. “Yorba Linda has always been a little different from every other city, and I think they should be trying to keep it different.”

Shell and Toll officials are just as earnest in support of their project.

“I guarantee you what we’re doing there is going to enhance the value of the surrounding communities,” said Jim Boyd, Toll Brothers regional manager, after a recent meeting to answer residents’ questions. “I think it’s going to be terrific.”

Project proponents talk about the $1.5 million a year the public golf course within the development would pour into the city treasury; the elementary school Shell would build; the horse, biking and hiking trails that would connect the city to Carbon Canyon Regional Park and Chino Hills State Park; and the various landscaped “vista points” throughout the neighborhoods.

But residents at a meeting last month actually gasped when they heard that some neighborhoods on the project’s west side would have as many as six or seven units per acre.

They also expressed concern that, because the only entrance planned for the development is on Valley View Avenue, the traffic from the new homes would turn their quiet street into a dangerous thoroughfare.

“I think it’s very unfair for you to turn my neighborhood into a slum, and that’s what you’re doing,” Nelson said at last week’s City Council meeting. “It’s great to have a school, it’s great to have parks, it’s great to have a golf course. But at what cost?”

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NEIGHBORHOODS / WEST YORBA LINDA

Bounded by: Imperial Highway on the south, Prospect Avenue on the west, Casa Loma Avenue on the east and the Chino Hills on the north

Population: About 600 homes

Hot topic: Proposed housing development in the Chino Hills above west Yorba Linda.