Good-Night Kiss Case Is Taking On Celebrity Status

A proposed ban on marital fights after 11 p.m. in the name of noise control. Restrictions on allowable poundage of pets per household. Rules controlling the color of homes, the size of shrubbery, and the stays of overnight visitors.

All are the stuff of laughs, lore and lawsuits in the battle over conformity now being waged between homeowners’ associations and their swelling memberships around the country.

Now, add the Case of the Good-Night Kiss to the ranks of the infamous.

It is the story of 51-year-old Kim Garrett of Santa Ana and a reprimand that she received from her Town Square homeowners’ association last month after kissing a date good night outside her condominium. In a letter that Garrett said was posted publicly at her complex, she was threatened with a fine if she was caught doing “bad things” like that again.

Assemblyman Gil Ferguson (R-Newport Beach), who sits on a committee in Sacramento that is considering legislation to rope in the powers of homeowner groups, said: “We hear stories all the time about community organizations trying to regulate the behavior of people--but none quite as outrageous as this one.”

Indeed, publicity over the weekend in the local media has catapulted Garrett--a Southern-reared Baptist, grandmother and financial consultant--to the status of cause celebre.

“I’ve been getting calls from media all over the country. . . . I didn’t expect this kind of interest,” she said. “It doesn’t feel real. It’s a totally ridiculous example of what could be happening out there with homeowners’ associations.”

Garrett was heard Monday morning on Michael Jackson’s radio talk show. The television program “Hard Copy” is scheduled to do a taping today at her Tustin office. And she has spoken with several lawyers, including noted feminist attorney Gloria Allred, about representing her in a possible lawsuit against her homeowners’ association.

“From the facts that I have reviewed,” Allred said Monday, “it appears that there has been an invasion of her privacy, defamation of her character, and that the conduct against her in my opinion was both reckless and negligent.”

Like Garrett, officials at the Long Beach-based Vanco Properties, which runs the Town Square association, were flooded with media inquiries Monday. But an employee in customer service who would not give her name said the company would have no comment.

Ferguson, who is vice chairman of the Assembly Committee on Housing and Community Development and says his South County district has the most community associations per capita in the country, said he might ask the panel to look at Garrett’s case.

“I don’t know of any community-association authority that would give them the right to regulate the behavior of adults . . . unless it is wantonly destructive,” he said of the Garrett case. “I just can’t believe that a responsible person in a community association would take such an action.”

Many homeowners’ groups “think they’re beyond local governments--they think they’re local gods,” Ferguson said.

The Newport legislator was part of a now-disbanded select Assembly panel that heard hours of testimony last year on the subject of “common-interest developments”--namely those made up of private homeowners who share a governing association.

In its executive report, the panel noted that common-interest developments--promising shared amenities, financial protection and neighborhood security--have grown from 5,000 nationwide in 1960 to 130,000 today. One in 10 Californians now lives in such communal setups.

But the report warned: “These private, quasi-democratic governments wielded the kind of control over people’s personal lives and tastes heretofore unknown in California.”

“The danger,” the report stated, “is that current problems will escalate, that residents will throw up their hands in frustration at their inability to cope with neighborhood self-help, and (common-interest developments) will become little more than failed ghost towns.”

As a result of these conclusions, state legislators are now considering a package of eight bills that seeks to rein in the associations. Among the proposals are laws to set up a state bureau to oversee the groups and mediate disputes outside of court; to specify the notification procedure for association meetings and agendas, and to set limits for the now-unrestricted fines that associations can levy against their members.

Homeowners who have battled their associations say it’s about time.

Willow Vance, who owns a four-bedroom house in a Lake Forest community, is full of stories about neighborhood run-ins over landscaping, basketball hoops on property, and the installation of a privacy wall around a sauna--all deemed objectionable.

“They’re mostly trivial things,” Vance said. “But if you’re a homeowner in an association and you have a problem, you have no recourse unless you go to court and want to bring a suit. We need some help.”