Activists Disagree on Biggest Problems at Airport, Survey Finds

Disagreement among neighborhood activists about the biggest problems at John Wayne Airport has left the Board of Supervisors unable to make significant changes, a UC Irvine professor said Wednesday.

“There’s nothing sinister about the Board of Supervisors’ actions,” Dr. Mark Petracca, UCI assistant professor of political science, said in announcing the results of a recent survey. “It may sound funny, but with that lack of unanimity, that lack of cohesion, they may have been denied the societal pressure they need to make a decision.”

Petracca and an undergraduate assistant, Vicki Kuvelis, mailed out 800 survey questionnaires to addresses taken from the membership lists of community action groups concerned with the airport, including Stop Polluting Our Newport, the Backbay Council and the Committee of 2000.

The survey asked, simply: “How would you define the problem of the John Wayne Airport?” That portion of the survey did not include suggested responses. The survey then went on to ask those being polled to rank specific problems--noise, safety, pollution, surface traffic and overcrowded facilities.

The 300 responses surprised Petracca because the opinions expressed were so divergent, he said at a news conference Wednesday at the university.

Thirty percent of those who responded pointed to factors relating to the rights of residents near the airport, such as declining property values and quality of life, in identifying problems, Petracca said.

Another 29% responded that noise was the problem, and only 19% were concerned about safety.

Only 55% ranked safety as a “very important” issue, Petracca said.

Petracca conceded, however, that safety is an issue that becomes more important to people when it is in the news. If the survey had been conducted after the recent Detroit air crash and changes in Los Angeles airspace regulations, he said, safety might have been the uniting issue.

On the other hand, noise is something residents must deal with constantly, he said.

The survey revealed that respondents believed overcrowding and noise problems at John Wayne Airport could be solved if air traffic was spread to the military bases at El Toro and Camp Pendleton. But respondents also believed that solution, one of several suggested by the survey, was the least likely to be implemented.

Petracca said that indicated a lack of faith in elected officials and feelings that any community efforts would be in vain. Ninety-seven percent of the respondents said the Board of Supervisors had not adequately solved the problems ranked in the survey. Sixty-five percent said the supervisors were not responsive to citizens’ input, and only 12% said their community associations had been successful in achieving their goals.

But Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, whose 5th District includes the area around the airport and who said he lives under jet flight patterns, questioned the survey’s results.

“If it had been written in the early ‘70s, it might have some validity,” he said.

But since then, the Board of Supervisors has been actively pursuing solutions to the present airport situation, which he called “a disgrace to Orange County.”

In August, 1985, the board reached a compromise with citizens groups under which the number of big-jet takeoffs will increase from 55 to 73 when the new John Wayne terminal opens. The opening is scheduled for the early 1990s.

Before that compromise, Riley said, the board had tried to avoid committing future boards to an airport agreement. But the 20-year deal struck in 1985 ended that stalemate, he said.

“I’m very excited about (the airport’s future),” he said, “and I didn’t know anybody in Orange County who was not excited about it.”

But Jean Watt, the president of Stop Polluting Our Newport, said she was not excited about it. She agreed with Petracca’s conclusions about citizens’ disillusionment with the system. The compromise was accepted, she said, only because citizens could come up with nothing better.

“We tried, and we failed,” she said.

Under the agreement, she said, the number of big jets is limited, but the number of smaller passenger aircraft, such as the British-made 100-seat BAe-146, is not.

Petracca said the survey was not intended to be a representative sampling of citizens’ views but was part of a larger, two-year project studying political processes in Orange County.