Scaled-Down Plan Recommended for Santa Ana Heights : Planners Endorse Removal of 180 Homes During Hearing Jolted by Suicide Report

In one of its most dramatic hearings ever, the Orange County Planning Commission Tuesday recommended a scaled-down redevelopment plan for Santa Ana Heights that would remove about 180 homes from below the flight path of John Wayne Airport.

More than 60 residents--some against redevelopment, some for it --filled the Planning Commission chambers for the emotional, 4 1/2-hour meeting.

The hearing took an unusual turn when a 29-year-old man strode to the microphone and quietly declared:

“My father blew his brains out this morning because you have no impact on this situation.”

Domonic Munoz, a resident of Cypress Street in Santa Ana Heights, said he found his 79-year-old father dead in his home Tuesday morning from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. According to Munoz--in a report confirmed by Sheriff’s Department officials--a copy of a local newspaper was found beside the body of Raymond R. Munoz, with the front page featuring an article on the redevelopment plan.

Munoz said his father, a retired cement hauler who had been suffering from emphysema, had lived in Santa Ana Heights for 29 years.

Munoz, angered at planning commissioners’ protests that they have no voice in whether the airport is to be expanded, said, “You guys tell me there is no impact from this airport. Well, I’ve got another thing to tell you. If you think for one minute I’m going to stand by and watch my daddy die for nothing, you’re wrong . . . . I will fight you to the bitter end.” Tears began streaming down his face and the rowdy audience grew hushed.

“My father killed himself for no other reason than this airport. Before this program, there was never any question of his taking his life, and I will go to no end to get back. You could pay me a billion dollars, and it wouldn’t buy my daddy back.”

Munoz grew more emotional as his wife led him from the hearing room, and sheriff’s deputies were called to escort him from the building after he began pounding on the walls and screaming back toward the hearing room.

Martha Durkee, the Munozes’ next door neighbor, went to the podium a few moments later and said, “I don’t know if we have expressed to you how much stress many of these people are under.” She added:

“I have sat in some of these people’s living rooms while they cried. These are homes. These are memories. Some of these people have lived here 41 years.”

The compromise plan recommended Tuesday is identical to one proposed by a variety of neighborhood groups within Santa Ana Heights and is considerably less expansive than the plan proposed by the county planning staff, which would convert 294 homes to offices and business parks to make way for expansion of the airport.

The hearing represented one of the last opportunities for residents of the small community to do battle against a plan to make their neighborhoods compatible with expansion of the airport to as many as 73 daily jet flights.

Under the compromise plan recommended by the Planning Commission, the Munoz and Durkee homes would be preserved.

However, the Board of Supervisors must make the final decision on the future of Santa Ana Heights, and that vote is far from certain.

Urge Redevelopment

A number of residents whose homes would be preserved under the compromise plan have strongly advocated redevelopment, both because they no longer wish to live near the airport and because redevelopment would give them a chance to sell their homes to commercial developers. They are likely to lobby during the next week for a more wide-ranging redevelopment plan.

And Supervisor Thomas Riley, whose district includes the area, has said he favors a more ambitious redevelopment plan that would convert most of the homes within the interior of Santa Ana Heights to office parks, except for homes bordering each side of Mesa Drive.

County Planning Director Robert Fisher said the planning staff has recommended the larger-scale redevelopment, which does away with most of the rural, half-acre residences in the heart of Santa Ana Heights, because of intense pressure for commercial development that exists there.

It is an area that “appears to us to be at the end of its economic life,” Fisher said, adding that with an increased tendency for tenant-occupancy and low maintenance, the area is doomed to “a kind of planned neglect . . . . The pressures for change are there, and would be there even if the airport didn’t exist, in my opinion.”

Change in Standards

Yet it was clear that Orange County is not alone in attempting to balance its growing airport with surrounding neighborhoods. Fisher said his research has shown that no major airport in California will be in compliance with state noise standards once those standards are tightened at the end of this year.

Essentially, the compromise plan recommended by the Planning Commission allows most of the homes east of Birch Street to remain in place. Those within the official jet noise impact area--about 415 homes--would be eligible for free noise insulation by the county, or a county purchase-assurance program and relocation benefits if residents chose to move.

Commissioner Alvin Coen, in seconding the motion to recommend the plan, said: “Those who choose to live in impacted areas such as the airport should be allowed to do so, without becoming a nonconforming use.”

The commission concurred on a 4-1 vote.

The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to act on both the Santa Ana Heights plan and the airport expansion plan on Jan. 30, although there has been some discussion of delaying a final decision.