TUSTIN : New Effort Due on Marine Land Swap

Orange County is preparing to negotiate an end to a complex, longstanding land dispute that has prevented the Marine Corps from building badly needed housing in Tustin and the county from completing highway improvements near El Toro.

County officials will sit down by the end of the month with the Irvine Co. to try to set a purchase price for 41 acres next to Tustin Marine Corps Air Station, said Michael M. Ruane, director of the Orange County Environmental Management Agency.

A resolution of the land impasse would mean that the county and the city of Irvine could proceed with key road projects near El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Among them are the extension of Alton Parkway through the El Toro base to the foothill communities, building a Bake Parkway interchange on Interstate 5 and the widening of the El Toro “Y” interchange, where Interstate 5 meets the San Diego Freeway.

The Alton project, which would be first off the drawing board, would provide an alternate route around heavily congested residential neighborhoods in El Toro and Lake Forest, Ruane said.

Irvine Co. land near the Tustin base is the linchpin in a complicated land deal involving the county and the Corps that was originally conceived during the administration of President Richard M. Nixon, said Col. Jack Wagner, community liaison officer for Marine air bases in Arizona and Southern California.

The county plans to turn over the newly acquired Irvine Co. property to the Corps, which will use it to build housing for some of the 1,400 Marines who are on housing waiting lists at both the Tustin and El Toro bases.

In exchange, the Corps will give the county, for use as parkland, 137 acres at Mile Square Regional Park in Fountain Valley, a former military installation.

The Board of Supervisors formally agreed to buy the Irvine Co. property in December, 1987, but the deal stalled while the county grappled with the question of how to pay for the land, which has continued to rise in value. One appraisal reportedly placed its worth as high as $1 million an acre.

For a time, officials searched for county-owned property to swap with the Irvine Co. rather than pay cash, Ruane said. But the land the county wanted the firm to accept in trade “really wasn’t anything they wanted,” Wagner said.

The Corps raised the ante last year, when county officials approached the Marines about buying land and a right of way at the El Toro base for the road projects.

“When they wanted to come to us to talk about Alton,” Wagner said, “I simply said, ‘That sounds reasonable. . . . However, live up to your first agreement. Why should we enter a new agreement with you if you haven’t fulfilled your first agreement?’ ”

Instead of proposing a land swap with the Irvine Co., the county has decided to make a more conventional offer: cash.

The county also plans to buy about 65 acres of Marine Corps land at El Toro for the road projects. According to an unclassified Marine document obtained by The Times, “the sale would generate a minimum of $17 million” for the Corps.

The Corps would use that money to build housing on the former Irvine Co. land near the Tustin base.