ORANGE COUNTY PERSPECTIVE : Far From Ripe for the Ballot

The promoters of a thumbs-up/thumbs-down referendum on building a commercial airport at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station have had their moment. May it be only that, a moment.

Armed with 114,879 petition signatures, they have boxed into a corner the very people ultimately responsible for planning the future of the base. In doing so, they suggest their own disrespect for the unfolding processes of government and for those elected to make difficult decisions.

The county supervisors had little choice but to vote last week to put on the November ballot the so-called Orange County/El Toro Economic Stimulus Initiative, which would be binding on the county government. Let’s hope that before Election Day the voting public recognizes that there already is a careful and deliberate planning process under way that will address a range of possible uses for the base once it closes.

As we have noted, one has to wonder how many of the people who signed petitions really understood that planning for El Toro indeed is in progress. While there have been sharp differences expressed about the future of the base, and while there have been false starts in the planning, no serious observer could argue that the process has become so flawed or so tied up that the voters now must take matters in hand and overrule their hapless elected officials. And yet this is the premise that seems to underlie the very existence of initiative; it’s the misleading suggestion that Orange County has reached policy gridlock over the future of El Toro.

What a clever but cynical smoke screen to throw up at a time when government by initiative and impatience with elected officials at every level run rampant. Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, eloquent and perhaps relishing the opportunity for candor implicit in his final months in office, said it well: “Today, the airport initiative is the same type of ballot-box planning that once worried so many of the people who are the initiative’s strongest supporters.”

There may be a time when some advisory referendum on a range of alternatives will be useful to planners. But it would be foolish to commit the county, through a magic-bullet initiative, to build an airport without requisite consideration of other choices, and without much in the way of information on how to pay for it all.

The sponsors, in their haste for new business opportunities, have done a disservice by forcing an issue critical to Orange County’s future onto the ballot prematurely.