North, South on Collision Course Over Airport Site : Aviation: A ‘Civil War’ erupts between northern cities pushing for a location near San Clemente and southern officials who vow to stop those plans.

When Newport Beach and its neighbors look for a place to build a regional airport, they turn southeast toward Cristianitos Canyon, where a relatively flat rural plain east of San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano suggests to them a runway.

San Juan Capistrano Councilman Lawrence F. Buchheim sees it rather differently.

Noting that the canyon is within a few miles of his city, San Clemente and Mission Viejo--and pointedly reminding anyone who will listen that aircraft using the site would take off almost directly over the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station just over the San Diego County border--Buchheim said bluntly:

“We will use every means at our disposal--legal, political and otherwise--to stop an airport at Cristianitos.”

To the consternation of Buchheim and other South County officials, however, Newport Beach and five other northern cities have banded together to pursue Cristianitos Canyon for a future airport, even though county supervisors oppose all Orange County sites, preferring one in remote San Bernardino County.

The Newport Beach group plans to interview engineering firms later this month and hire one to outline the work needed to develop either Cristianitos or another local site.

In South County, the howls of protest are loud and shrill, and some officials worry that the emotional debate is already severely fracturing relations between northern and southern county cities.

“It’s a north-south fight is what it is,” said Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad), whose district includes South Orange County. “It’s the Civil War all over again.”

In this war between the cities, the Mason-Dixon line runs just north and west of Tustin, and the players line up neatly by geography: The Orange County Cities Airport Authority includes members from Garden Grove, Anaheim, Stanton, Santa Ana, Yorba Linda and Newport Beach. Its opponents are led by San Clemente and include officials from Dana Point, San Juan Capistrano, Mission Viejo, Tustin and Irvine.

None of the cities, predictably, wants a new airport in its back yard. All say they are willing to play hardball to see that one is not planted next door.

It all makes for an explosive showdown. Threats of legal action have become common, and officials have leveled blistering broadsides at each other in public sessions.

“Our City Council is livid,” said Bill Mecham, a former mayor of San Clemente now acting as an airport consultant to that city. “It’s regarded here as a very adversarial situation.”

Ken Delino, deputy city manager of Newport Beach and founder of the airport group, acknowledged that the authority’s work has stirred passions and that it has not made him many friends in South County.

“They’ve told me not only no, but hell no,” Delino said. “They made it clear that they’re going to fight it tooth and nail.”

Packard could not agree more: “I will block them any way I can. If I have any influence at all, I will use it to keep this airport from being built in South County.”

Packard has been even more vocally opposed to another potential airport site, on Camp Pendleton land north of Oceanside. Supporters say such a regional facility would relieve overcrowding at both Orange and San Diego county airports, while opponents say that site would compromise the undeveloped Marine Corps buffer zone between burgeoning South Orange County and North San Diego County.

The intensity has become particularly sharp during the last several weeks because South County officials thought they had put the issue to rest. The supervisors’ appointed Airport Site Coalition, after two years of study, identified Cristianitos Canyon as one of two sites most worth pursuing, noting its low cost, easy access and private ownership. Leland Oliver, who led that group, called Cristianitos “eminently flyable.”

But the supervisors rejected that advice unanimously, instead voting to pursue development of George Air Force Base, near Adelanto in San Bernardino County, into a commercial airport.

South County officials were overjoyed and confident that the issue was dead. But within a month, the northern cities had it back on the table, and the battle was back on.

“It’s too early to put all our eggs in the George basket,” said Newport’s Delino. “In the meantime, we’re fighting to keep the other sites alive.”

For the northern cities, the concern about George is that if it does not hold up under scrutiny, the supervisors will reopen the site search and could end up picking a North County location.

“There’s no studies, no nothing on George,” said Henry W. Wedaa, a Yorba Linda councilman and longtime chairman of the Southern California Assn. of Governments’ aviation committee. “It’s a bunch of nonsense. The supervisors just took an escape mechanism for avoiding a tough decision.”

Like many officials, Wedaa predicted that the tough decisions still lie ahead and that the county’s cities have not seen the last of its airport squabbling. South and north will continue to wage the battle until a site is finally picked and under construction, said Wedaa, whose own preference is for converting El Toro Marine Corps Air Station into a joint military-civilian airport.

“It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better,” Wedaa said. “But if we are going to be responsible politicians, we have to address this.”