LAGUNA BEACH : Landscape Document Loses Some Clout

A set of landscaping guidelines has been endorsed by the City Council as a “resource document” but rejected as part of the city’s General Plan.

Wayne L. Peterson, one of three council members who voted to demote the document Tuesday, said “there were at least three people who did not feel we needed another layer” in the General Plan.

All new development must comply with the plan.

Mayor Kathleen Blackburn and Councilman Paul Freeman cast the dissenting votes. Both favored including the document in the plan, as did city planning commissioners, who unanimously approved the guidelines last month.

The rejection was a blow for members of a task force who had worked for two years on the document, which offered design guidelines for neighborhood planting and for landscaping along scenic highways.

“I just think it was pretty unfair, actually,” said Ann M. Christoph, a task force member who was on the previous council when the group was formed. “It’s a case of asking citizens to work on something and they dedicate hours and hours of time and then to more or less denigrate their efforts.”

Christoph was not encouraged by the preservation of the guidelines as a resource document.

“But what does that mean? It has the lowest of the low status,” she said. “It’s like calling it a dictionary. It’s like something you could look something up in if you wanted to.”

Christoph said the council’s action once again points up the difference in philosophy between the previous and current council majorities.

A new council majority was elected in November partly on a wave of sentiment that the previous council had too often favored environmental preservation over individual property rights.

Peterson said he expects the new resource document to be useful.

“I think it will gradually become a guiding plan for neighborhoods,” he said.