Time Is Now to Create El Toro Plan : Ideas for conversion are plentiful. What’s missing is the bipartisan leadership that would make all the difference.

It’s anybody’s guess whether the federal Defense Base Closure and Realignment Commission will grant yet one more reprieve, extending the life of the Marine Corps Air Station at El Toro a bit longer. Whatever the commission’s decision, this much is certain: One of these days the order will be issued to shut down the military base at El Toro. That’s why it’s time that local officials and citizen activists get busy--and fast--in developing a 21st-Century land use and economic conversion plan for El Toro.

A worthy plan would begin by facing up to the daunting task of environmental cleanup at the military base. Most people seem to have forgotten that El Toro’s 50-year history of service to our country has been accompanied by a very nasty byproduct: toxic pollution.

For decades, beginning in the 1940s, aircraft fuels and other toxic materials were buried or otherwise dumped in the ground at El Toro. The accumulated toxics created a massive underground plume--a frightening brew of dangerous and even cancer-causing chemicals that today stretches all the way from El Toro to Woodbridge Village in the center of Irvine.

While the toxic plume is reportedly contained, the pollution is so bad that in the 1980s the Irvine-El Toro site was listed as a priority for cleanup under the federal Superfund program.

Well, here we are, years later. What are we waiting for, contamination of our water supply? With the possibility that the military base at El Toro will be closed, it’s all the more important that we have a ready-to-go plan to put thousands of people to work removing the underground toxins and restoring our local soils. This is not easy work. It will require a sophisticated mix of high-tech and low-tech jobs. But it’s work that has to be done, and the sooner the better.

In his February State of the Union message, one of President Clinton’s big applause lines was his reference to the Superfund and his insistence that we spend less on lawyers and more on actual cleanup. Amen! Let’s put the President’s pro-environment rhetoric to the test right here, right now.

Once the environmental cleanup at El Toro is underway, the questions of long-term land use and economic conversion can be addressed in earnest.

Naturally, the usual Newport Beach crowd will be pressing for a huge commercial airport at El Toro. But political realities are bound to prevail.

The vast majority of residents in Tustin, Irvine, Lake Forest, Laguna Hills, Laguna Beach, Santa Margarita and Mission Viejo would provide for the early retirement of the first South County politician stupid enough to support commercialization of El Toro. A far more realistic vision for El Toro is as a 21st-Century hub for a revitalized network of Southern California rail service.

Anyone serious about solving our transportation problems knows the advantages of rail transportation. It’s economical; it’s remarkably safe; it’s energy-efficient and virtually non-polluting. And rail allows our freeways and roads to function properly again by restoring balance and real choice to our transportation system.

This isn’t theory; it’s fact. Revitalized rail systems are an emerging West Coast success story--in San Diego, San Jose, Sacramento, Portland and Vancouver. So far, the only real problem has been that we haven’t moved fast enough in rebuilding once-thriving rail systems here in Southern California.

That’s where El Toro comes in. Next to job-rich, high-tech industries, El Toro is the perfect site for developing a National Center for Transportation and Environmental Excellence. The center should be thought of as a national laboratory--a vast public-private partnership where thousands of aerospace scientists and engineers can be put to work learning how to design and build modern rail systems, first for ourselves, then for other regions of the country and finally for export to the rest of the world.

Working with Orange County developers, we could test the concept of “transit villages”--clustered housing, shops and public spaces, all within walking distance of a local rail line that connects to employment centers. Transit villages are more than an idea; they are a working reality in the San Francisco Bay Area. And they can work here as well.

This is one of the promising prospects that California voters had in mind in June of 1990 when they passed Proposition 116, the $2-billion Rail Transportation Bond Act. Included in the act was $125 million earmarked for the city of Irvine--more than for any other city in the state. The $125 million was for the purpose of building a “fixed guideway demonstration” project, what many of us envisioned as a 10- to 15-mile initial link in a countywide monorail system.

Even if the Base Closure Commission decides to keep El Toro open, there is every reason to push ahead with conversion planning keyed to environmental cleanup and 21st-Century transportation initiatives. Next to El Toro is the Irvine Transportation Center, today an Amtrak station and a logical connecting point for a pioneering monorail system. With room to grow, the Irvine Transportation Center could evolve into a truly remarkable national transportation laboratory producing state-of-the-art technology that can be applied where we live and work.

Irvine’s $125 million is still there to get things started. So are the ideas for conversion. What’s missing is the kind of can-do bipartisan leadership that would make all the difference. To get things started, Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) and at least one of our two new U.S. senators, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, should convene a public hearing and get the entire Orange County community involved in the exciting possibilities for planning our own future.