Citizen Panel’s Airport Site Report May Not Get Warmest of Welcomes : Supervisors: Inclusion of two South County locations, failure to share information before releasing it have caused annoyance on the board.

A citizens panel that has spent two years trying to select a Southland regional airport site will present its final report to the Orange County Board of Supervisors next week, and officials predicted Thursday that the findings may fall on unfriendly ears.

The report will set out the Airport Site Coalition’s four recommended sites--two in South Orange County, one at Camp Pendleton near Oceanside and one at March Air Force Base in Riverside County--coalition president Leland Oliver said Thursday.

The report does not rank the sites formally, officials said, but it does prioritize them by several criteria. It also includes an “action plan” that recommends procedures for going ahead with the airport site selection.

Several supervisors, however, are openly opposed to building a second commercial airport in Orange County and therefore are concerned that the report will list the two South County sites despite local opposition.

What’s more, tensions have been strained by the coalition’s decision not to share its report with the supervisors before the meeting Tuesday morning.

“We know that you share with the board of our organization the desire to not have the matter appear in the press prior to the time that the Board of Supervisors has received the information publicly,” Oliver wrote in a March 26 letter to the supervisors. “We very much appreciate this departure from the usual procedure that accompanies the placing of an item on the agenda and assure you that the purpose is to guarantee the integrity of the information until the moment of presentation.”

Nevertheless, some supervisors and their staffs are annoyed with the coalition for keeping them in the dark. Combined with the supervisors’ reticence to endorse an Orange County regional airport site, that has helped set the stage for what many predict will be an uneasy session Tuesday.

In separate interviews this week, supervisors Thomas F. Riley and Don R. Roth, chairman of the board, indicated that they are strongly opposed to building a second airport in Orange County in order to relieve congestion at John Wayne Airport.

That heavily congested facility serves 4.75 million passengers annually and is already undergoing an expansion. Its capacity is limited by a 1985 court settlement to 8.4 million passengers a year even after the new terminal is complete. (The settlement placed noise restrictions on the facility.)

“It’s going to be almost impossible, it seems to me, to get a regional airport in Orange County,” said Riley, who represents the South County area where the two proposed airport sites are located. “Those sites just don’t make sense.”

Mission Viejo City Councilman Norman P. Murray, who chairs another group called the Coalition for a Responsible Airport Solution, agreed.

Murray, one of many South County elected officials who actively oppose an airport in that area, said the proposed Potrero Los Pinos site northeast of San Juan Capistrano is too environmentally sensitive, and the Cristianitos Canyon site, just outside San Clemente, is too close to the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.

Both sites also have traffic access problems, Murray added.

The supervisors have twice adopted resolutions stating that there is no “viable” site for a new regional airport in Orange County.

As an alternative, Roth strongly backs building a new regional airport at George Air Force Base in San Bernardino County. That base lies near the proposed route for a high-speed train linking Anaheim and Las Vegas.

Roth, who says his “middle name is SST, for super-speed train,” hopes to see the airport built on the route as a way of bolstering both the airport and the train system’s success.

Oliver said that while George Air Force Base remains an intriguing option--and the report will recommend further study of it--the base is too far from population centers to be feasible in the near future.