A Question of Access

The incredible growth in Orange County’s southern suburbs has challenged planners, educators and residents. The trend toward putting neighborhoods behind fences and gates makes things even more complicated. What began as an attempt to provide for education in the affluent Coto de Caza area became an object lesson in the problems that gated communities can pose for public accommodation.

The proposal by some residents to put a new public elementary school behind Coto’s gates unfolded simply enough. New families in the Capistrano Unified School district had put pressure on school officials either to expand existing facilities or build new ones. Students currently attend a nearby public school, but it is bursting at the seams. A well-intentioned group negotiated a deal that would have let the district lease a site and put in portable classrooms for the school.

The district is a public entity and it properly insisted on access for anyone with school business. So there was a disturbing quality to last week’s decisive vote by residents to reject the school proposal. There is a private school in Coto and a fire station within the gates is used by groups from outside the community. How then, was a public school something different? In seeking to preserve their lifestyle, the majority gave an impression of being unwilling to let in the hoi polloi.

Now, it is left to those beyond the gates to continue to host public school facilities for Coto’s residents.

Had the Coto school gone forward, there still might have been a court challenge over a public school on private property.But residents of gated communities can’t and shouldn’t have public services free of public accommodation. Those who want the public kept out and those who would refuse to put public facilities behind gates are oddly allied about separating what’s public from what’s private. But there also is something fundamentally unfair about asking those on the outside to provide the location for the public services for those on the private side. The courts should give weight to that when these issues come up.

The school district serving Coto de Caza already has in place an alternative plan to address the enrollment problem. But at some point, those who approve gated communities must resolve upfront questions about siting the public facilities that inevitably result from growth, and making sure people get to use them.