Coral Gables, Fla. ? Founded in the 1920s as a fantasyland of Mediterranean architecture, this affluent Miami suburb, one of the nation’s first planned communities, has a long-standing reputation for zealous aesthetic policing, ruling over everything from hedge heights to what colors residents may paint their homes.

Now a guy in a pickup truck is threatening the social order.

Lowell Kuvin, 44, wound up on the wrong side of the local code one night four years ago when he parked his forest green 1993 Ford F-150 outside the house he was renting.

The city defines pickup trucks, even those for personal use, as “out of character,” and forbids parking them overnight within city limits. He got a $50 ticket.

“I thought, ‘Now how silly is this?'” he recalled.

Now the fight over that citation, which Kuvin stubbornly pursued to a state appellate court, is raising ticklish questions about whether some of the city’s longtime interest in municipal decor stems more from snobbery than aesthetics.

The central question in the ticket case has become: Are the city ordinances targeting pickup trucks, or are they, more sinisterly, trying to exclude the people who drive them?

City officials say it’s merely a matter of community appearance, and the City Commission voted unanimously last week to pursue enforcing Kuvin’s ticket.

“We are trying to regulate the look of the neighborhoods,” Mayor Don Slesnick said.

But Kuvin, now backed by an appellate court, disagrees.

“This has to do with a certain class of people they don’t want in the city – people they see as being inferior – the blue-collar guy, the laborer – those people,” Kuvin said.

The flap began in February 2003, when Kuvin was living in a rented home without a garage. He’d bought the pickup because he liked to sail, and the sails fit better in a truck bed.

Kuvin, who was then preparing to attend law school, turned to his brother to fight the ticket.

The brothers argued that while local governments can regulate zoning and other aesthetic matters, this time the city went too far. It did not simply ban commercial trucks from residential neighborhoods, it banned all trucks, even pickups solely for personal use. A separate ordinance bans pickups from parking anywhere from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m.

The trouble with the ordinances, according to the state’s Third District Court of Appeal, arises because, in part, pickups are not inordinately uglier or even larger than other vehicles that are permitted to park on city streets. The Ford F-150 is about the same length as luxury sedans such as the Lincoln Town Car, a judge noted.

Like Kuvin, the court suggested that the city may be targeting the people who drive pickups, not just the vehicles.

In their opinion, the judges cited a study published by the Institute for Transportation Studies at the University of California at Davis showing that buyers of pickup trucks are more likely to have less education, to be middle-income and to be full-time employees in service-related jobs.