Lake Forest to File Suit Over El Toro Initiative : Development: City council members say the ballot measure, which supports a commercial airport at the Marine facility, is inconsistent with the county General Plan and promotes chaos and litigation.

In an unexpected move, the Lake Forest City Council announced Tuesday night that it will file a lawsuit seeking to remove an initiative from the November ballot that calls for a commercial airport at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Council members emerged from a closed session to announce that they had voted unanimously to file a lawsuit against sponsors of the initiative, the Committee for 21,000 New Jobs, saying the measure is inconsistent with the county General Plan.

Immediately after their surprise announcement, council members issued a press release to explain their decision but made no other public statements.

“These inconsistencies, if adopted, will promote chaos and litigation over matters such as building intensity standards, traffic capabilities and noise problems,” Mayor Marcia Rudolph said in the statement.

The City Council maintains that the initiative will change the General Plan to allow a commercial airport but will not address other issues such as transportation and noise.

The measure also will bypass state planning laws, city officials said.

“This is another example of special-interest attempts to sell their products by ‘ballot box planning,’ of a piecemeal nature to circumvent a California environmental quality act,” Councilman Tim Link said in the press release.

Some proponents of the initiative expressed surprise at the council’s action but did not express concern.

“This was an initiative signed by over a 100,000 Orange County voters, far in excess of the requirement” to place it on the ballot, said Garden Grove Councilman Mark Leyes, who supports the initiative. By saying they will file a lawsuit, Lake Forest council members “don’t give voters enough credit,” Leyes said.

Buck Johns, a developer who is a major financial backer of the initiative, said, “It will be interesting to see what’s going to happen. . . .

“Lake Forest has been pretty aggressive in this, haven’t they?” Johns said. “This is the first I’ve heard” of a lawsuit. “I wish them well.”

Lake Forest’s announcement surprised even its allies.

“I wasn’t even aware of this until now,” said Mission Viejo Mayor Susan Withrow, a member of the South County Working Group, a coalition of cities that was established to create alternative proposals to a commercial airport. The group includes Lake Forest.

Withrow said the coalition rejected filing a similar lawsuit two weeks ago.

“We weren’t confident of what the results would be,” she said. “We didn’t want the public to perceive a lawsuit as an elite action that would squelch the public’s right to vote.”

But a single-party lawsuit by Lake Forest wouldn’t be elitist, Withrow said.

Along with Irvine and the County Board of Supervisors, Lake Forest is a member of the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority board of directors, set up to determine how the El Toro base should be used after its closure by 1999.

Councilwoman Ann Van Haun, Lake Forest’s representative on the Planning Authority board, said the initiative would usurp the group’s authority.

The authority, “established by the county of Orange and the cities of Irvine and Lake Forest, and recognized by the surrounding communities and the federal government as the local planning agency, would be completely short-circuited by a mandatory airport authority,” she said.

Lake Forest officials acknowledged that obtaining a court order to remove the initiative might be difficult.

“The city of Lake Forest has a duty to challenge the legality of the initiative,” Councilman Richard T. Dixon said in the written statement. “If we do not take action now, people will wonder. If we do act now, we may succeed in knocking it off the ballot.”

The initiative qualified in the June election primary with 118,000 signatures. Supporters backing the measure include numerous business and political leaders in the county.