Airport Committee Reportedly Asks 2nd Site, 55-Flight Limit

A committee of influential businessmen, asked several years ago by the county to help find a new Orange County airport site, reconvened this week at the request of developer Henry Segerstrom to try to influence the upcoming decision on the expansion of John Wayne Airport.

The committee, which includes executives and board members from some of the county’s largest corporations, met Tuesday behind closed doors and reportedly drafted recommendations calling for limited expansion of John Wayne to 55 flights a day and the immediate selection of a second airport site in Orange County.

New Plan Under Study While most members of the so-called Blue Ribbon Regional Airport Committee--officially disbanded by the Board of Supervisors two years ago--declined to discuss the issue, committee member Henry Wedaa, a Yorba Linda city councilman, said Wednesday: “The resolution we adopted says it all, and it basically says that the board should scale down their intentions at John Wayne.”

A $190-million master plan scheduled for consideration by the Board of Supervisors on Jan. 30 calls for immediate expansion from 41 daily jet flights to 55, growing to 73 daily flights once a new terminal is built.

There has been strong business support for the plan, but the blue-ribbon committee’s action this week is part of a growing move among business interests to support a compromise for more limited expansion of John Wayne, coupled with the development of a limited-scale airport somewhere else in the county.

Both the Newport Beach and the Costa Mesa chambers of commerce have adopted similar positions in the past few weeks.

Met at Pacific Mutual Member of the committee, now calling themselves the Blue Ribbon Alumni, met in the board room of Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co. of Newport Beach at the invitation of the company’s chairman, Walter Gerkin, a committee member.

Other committee members present, in addition to Wedaa and Segerstrom, included Keith Murdoch, former Anaheim city manager; Timothy Strader, a former Koll Co. executive vice president who is now president of Aries Development Co.; Dr. William F. Ballhaus, retired president and vice chairman of Beckman Instruments Inc., and Donald B. Christeson, president of the Christeson Co.

Segerstrom is president of C.J. Segerstrom & Sons, developers of South Coast Plaza and several other large projects in the area near the airport.

Individual committee members have scheduled private meetings with the supervisors over the next several days, but board members said Wednesday that they had not been told the substance of the group’s recommendations.

Sources close to the committee, however, said the position statement essentially contains three recommendations:

- That John Wayne be improved and expanded to handle 55 flights a day.

- That the master plan now in effect for the airport is too expansive and should be rejected.

- That immediate steps be taken to designate a second site for an airport.

The blue-ribbon committee was disbanded by the board in 1982 after it produced a report that recommended development of a new regional airport on Irvine Co. property in Santiago Canyon.

The board took no official action on the recommendation, but in view of nearly overwhelming opposition to a variety of potential sites, including Santiago Canyon, the supervisors voted 3 to 2 in October of that year to find that there simply were no possible sites in Orange County for a new regional airport.

‘Sort of Like Dracula’ Privately, county officials were expressing some skepticism about the blue-ribbon committee’s resurrection this week. “It’s sort of going on like Dracula,” joked one board aide. “You can’t stop it except by driving a stake through its heart.”

Supervisor Bruce Nestande, whose district includes the Santiago Canyon site, said, “I simply think the board is not going to act in this manner. The board dissolved the committee, and made a finding that there is no other airport site in Orange County. That’s an adopted position that is still there . . . . We have put an awful lot of work into this master plan, and to just scuttle the master plan now, I think, would be irresponsible.”

Nestande added: “When you analyze this whole thing, you begin to see an awful lot of agendas coming together. Obviously, some of the folks down in Newport Beach and South Coast Plaza want the traffic capacity for their buildings, and not the airport . . . . There’s only so much freeway capacity, and if the airport takes up some of that capacity, there’s less room for development. That’s all there is to it.”

Board Chairman Thomas F. Riley, whose district includes Newport Beach and the airport, said Christeson set up an appointment with him for next week but did not discuss details of the committee’s recommendations.

Opposes Another Site “I think (that), for the first time, serious-minded people who have the interests of the county and the area at heart are getting themselves involved, and that’s good,” Riley said. “It seems to me that the frustration level has reached a point where responsible people have said this is foolish, let’s get this thing resolved. And those people have gone out to involve a lot of other folks.”

Riley said an expansion to 55 flights is “a compromise that is being pretty much accepted all the way down the line”--though not necessarily by the rest of the board--and he said he remains firmly against another airport site.

However, Newport Beach city officials, who have been actively courting business leaders throughout the county for their proposal to hold John Wayne to 55 flights and develop a second airport elsewhere, say the second airport now being considered is not the large, regional facility proposed by the blue-ribbon committee two years ago.

Rather, it would be a much smaller facility, about equal in size to John Wayne, said Councilwoman Evelyn Hart.

Though she said she had not learned officially of the committee’s recommendations, Hart said that from what she had heard of them, “I’m very pleased. . . . I think it’s a fair approach.”

Wedaa, who is also chairman of the aviation committee of the Southern California Assn. of Governments (SCAG), said new airspace conflicts have taken away many of the advantages of Santiago Canyon, and the committee is not necessarily advocating that as a potential site.

SCAG several years ago suggested Camp Pendleton, the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station or an artificial island in the ocean as the best alternate airport sites for Orange County passengers. The use of either military base has been vehemently opposed by Nestande, Riley and the federal government.

‘Defensive Posture’ “I would hope that the board would recognize the folly of their ways,” Wedaa said. “To pour $200 million into an airport that everybody, including the board, recognizes cannot solve the long-term needs of the county makes no sense financially. And it also has the undesirable effect of putting the county, after the facility is built, in a defensive posture of having to defend their past action, and therefore doing little to solve the long-term needs.

“Let’s face it,” Wedaa added, “the board has a very, very difficult task. Other boards preceding them have been unwilling to bite the bullet, and the passage of time only makes it more difficult for each succeeding board to act. They have my sympathy, they really do.”