City Tries to Keep Airport From Landing : Bargaining: Tollway opposition would be muted in return for assurance of open space instead of airplanes in Cristianitos Canyon.

In the politics of road building, deals are often made. And if San Clemente officials get their way, one such barter would remove the threat of a new regional airport in the city’s back yard.

Here’s how the proposed bargain would work:

This quiet, slow-growth-oriented town by the sea would drop some of its resistance to the planned Foothill tollway, which when finished will extend from the Irvine Lake area through Rancho Santa Margarita, then south along Cristianitos Canyon to Interstate 5 somewhere between Avenida Pico and San Onofre.

In exchange, the county’s tollway agency would buy or somehow arrange to have someone purchase a big chunk of Cristianitos Canyon and preserve it as open space, forever.

Cristianitos Canyon, a scene of rugged grasslands and rocky slopes, is located north of the city’s boundary, between Ortega Highway and Avenida Pico. Some city residents vehemently oppose the toll road, arguing that it will promote urbanization, increase noise and air pollution, and threaten homes in its path.

But Cristianitos Canyon also happens to be one of the sites proposed for a new, regional airport in a report issued a year ago by the Airport Site Coalition.

“We see the Foothill tollway as an airport-inducing road,” said San Clemente Councilman Thomas Lorch. “A big part of the acceptability of the tollway alignment would involve making sure that an airport does not happen.”

Indeed, the Airport Site Coalition envisioned the Foothill tollway serving the proposed medium-haul airport, which the coalition’s technical staff estimated could handle 15.1-million passengers annually, or about 50% of Orange County’s projected air-travel demand by the year 2005.

And although the city-proposed deal is only conceptual at this point, tollway officials said they will seriously consider it as a way to compensate the public--and the environment--for damage caused by placement of the tollway in such an ecologically sensitive area.

“We haven’t even talked to the property’s owners,” said William C. Woollett Jr., executive director of the Foothill/Eastern Transportation Corridor Agency, which is planning the tollway. “But I would say that it will be discussed sometime before the (environmental impact report) for the southern alignment is completed in July.”

First, Woollett emphasized, the Marine Corps must give its final OK to any of several proposed alignments that take the road through a corner of Camp Pendleton.

The Marines already have strongly objected to construction of an airport in Cristianitos Canyon, partly because departing aircraft would fly through or close to restricted military air space. The Corps hasn’t welcomed tollway plans either.

Once the Marine Corps issue is settled, Woollett said, the proposed Cristianitos Canyon deal will be considered.

“It’s a political horse trade, but it might be a good idea,” said naturalist Paul Beier, who has studied Cristianitos Canyon for years and tracks the county’s mountain lions for a state and county project.

“It’s a nice canyon and should be preserved,” Beier said. “Rare species are found there . . . as well as a stand of California junipers which are not found much if at all elsewhere in the Santa Ana Mountains.”

Beier said that urban life is already taking its toll, with much of Cristianitos Canyon Road now torn up for installation of a huge water main.

The amount of acreage that would be involved in a new wilderness preserve is undetermined, city and tollway officials said.

The current owner, the O’Neill family, which owns Rancho Mission Viejo, previously has said the land is not for sale. Company officials could not be reached for comment.

Meanwhile, environmentalists are worried that the now vacant canyon, much of which is grasslands with a few stands of juniper, will be bulldozed for new houses in the next few years.

Environmentalists and city officials are particularly interested in attaching any Cristianitos Canyon acreage to an existing wilderness area now administered by the Talega Valley Conservancy.

The San Clemente City Council has instructed its two representatives to the tollway board--Scott Diehl and Joseph Anderson--to try to work out such an arrangement.

“This is a common-sense approach,” Anderson said.

The tollway agency is analyzing wildlife migration routes in the area. Steve Letterly, the agency’s environmental planner, has said that at least six animal crossings will be built across or under the tollway if the Cristianitos Canyon route is selected.

Although county supervisors have set their sights on George Air Force Base in San Bernardino County as the preferred facility to relieve John Wayne Airport, officials in San Clemente, Mission Viejo and San Juan Capistrano, among other cities, fear a change of heart.

That’s because Newport Beach and its neighbors are continuing to pressure county officials to build a new airport so that noise-weary residents near John Wayne Airport won’t shoulder the environmental impact of increased jet flights.

Rep. Ron Packard (R-Carlsbad) has called the airport battle a “north-south fight. . . . It’s the Civil War all over again.”

San Clemente officials said they will do almost anything to stop construction of an airport in the city’s back yard.

But even if the O’Neill family is willing to sell the land, who will pay for it?

That, said city officials, is perhaps the biggest unanswered question.

If the tollway agency can’t afford to buy it, officials said, they may look to the state or private donors to come up with the money.