Airport Area Activist Moving . . . . . . Sees Writing on the Wall : Planners Miss Voice of Jet-Noise Foe

More than 150 Santa Ana Heights residents filled the county Planning Commission’s chambers last week to protest a plan to expand John Wayne Airport, but there was one notable absence.

A hearing on the airport almost can’t happen unless Erma Batham is there, and when the tiny German immigrant wasn’t among those who filed to the microphone to take a shot at the Planning Commission, the director of planning himself got on the phone to find out why.

Hint of Resignation Batham, the woman who has spent the last 10 years battling to protect Santa Ana Heights from overflying jets, the wisecracking homemaker whose back-room clutter includes some of the few remaining copies of the official 1979 jet noise contour, was busy packing china into cardboard boxes and moving to a new home in Costa Mesa.

“Right now, they’re going to plow anyway,” she said with a shrug, for the first time exhibiting a hint, perhaps, of resignation. Although her move was prompted in part by divorce, she said she had planned to move anyway by July.

“When I heard they were going to go for 8B,” she said (she knows every land-use proposal by heart: 8B is conversion of hundreds of homes in Santa Ana Heights to office parks, and “noise-mitigation measures” for the remainder), “and they were going to extend University Drive . . . . I would have only been two houses away, with 44,000 cars, and how many jets? And I guarantee you, I guarantee it, 10 years from now, they’re going to take the rest. I call it the shaft.”

Batham has been at once annoying and endearing to the dozens of county officials who have had to deal with her testifying in public hearings, complaining on the phone about a particularly noisy business jet, or demanding copies of the latest reports from their offices. (Lately, they’ve taken to delivering copies to her door. “Last week, I didn’t answer the door,” she giggled.)

Can she be irritating, this woman with an accent so thick that the word “airport,” a word she definitely knows how to say, has a delicious trill to it?

“You might say that,” said William Martin, chief of the airport’s noise abatement office, who once had to install a noise monitor on Batham’s roof when she insisted--over Martin’s loud protests--that she was within the official noise impact area.

She wasn’t--by one decibel.

Demanded ‘All Sorts of Things’ “She insisted on it, and finally got (Supervisor Thomas) Riley to tell her I better do it,” Martin recalls. “She would demand all sorts of things. A plane would fly over and she wanted the name of the pilot and the name of the registered owner. In fact, I think she filed a small-claims action against one of them.”

Riley himself has taken many a phone call from Batham and has received, each year, a birthday card and a Christmas card from the Batham home in Santa Ana Heights.

“She was everywhere. I’d turn up and speak in Newport Beach, and she’d be there. She’s someone whose personality is certainly aggressive in nature because she really believes, without hesitation, that her position is the proper position, and I don’t think the President of the United States would deter her from her appointed way,” Riley said.

“Not that she singles me out to say Tom Riley is a good boy among all the other bastards,” he hastened to add. “I’m included in the bastards. But wherever we have met, Erma has been, I would have to say, a friend. She’s been a worthy competitor.”

The Board of Supervisors is to vote Jan. 30 on a plan to expand the airport’s use to as many as 73 daily flights and to phase out hundreds of homes in Santa Ana Heights.

When she moved in, Batham said, county officials promised her there would be no more than four flights a day at what was then Orange County Airport.

“When I left Germany in 1948, I came here because I wanted to be in a free country. I’m proud to be an American, by the way, very, very proud. However, they say you have freedom of speech, but I’ve learned a hell of a lot, being involved with politics. They say, ‘Speak up!’ And I find you speak up in front of the Planning Commission, they use it against you--and talk about mitigation.”

Part of her decision to move --beside the divorce settlement --was a realization that the fight was being lost, that Santa Ana Heights cannot remain the quiet, rural community it was in 1969, she said.

“It’ll never happen,” she said. “I used to think so. Yes, I did, I did. But I’ve come to realize that the airport is there to stay . . . . I would have loved to have stayed in that home for the rest of my life, but the people that are left behind, they are the victims.”

Batham says the authorities, rather than converting only part of the community to offices, should condemn all the housing and offer the residents fair compensation.

She’ll probably make that clear to them within the next few weeks.

“Don’t say I’ve given up,” she said. “Although I may be away from Santa Ana Heights, Santa Ana Heights is close to my heart, and always will be. I still care. All my friends are there. I haven’t given up.”