Plan to Buy Property at Airport Considered : County: The Board of Supervisors will review today a proposal to purchase five acres in the hope of settling a dispute over polluted land.

Seeking to settle a messy lawsuit over underground fuel contamination, the Ventura County Board of Supervisors today will consider purchasing five acres of land at the Oxnard Airport for $2.15 million.

The Oxnard Aero Center, which owns the property, had charged that fuel tanks at a nearby county-owned parcel leaked and polluted their land.

“There was apparently some contamination that had seeped from a couple of storage tanks onto this property,” said Ventura County Airports Administrator Rod Murphy. “It’s no longer a problem, but apparently the company wasn’t satisfied.”

After a year of negotiations, the Board of Supervisors agreed to purchase the land last month as part of a settlement agreement with the Oxnard Aero Center and several other firms regarding water and land pollution at the airport. The board will consider approving the deal today after a public hearing on the issue. A four-fifths vote is required.

A crop-dusting and jet-fuel company, Condor Helicopters, leased the county parcel from 1966 to 1986, when the spill was discovered.

Around the same time, Condor Helicopters was bought out by Evergreen Helicopters of Alaska, which refused to assume the cleanup costs for the fuel spill and an unrelated pesticide contamination. Their refusal led to a flurry of lawsuits involving the county and other firms at the airport.

“It has always been a question of (Evergreen) taking over the assets without taking over the liability,” said Assistant County Counsel Don Hurley.

Ironically, the county expects to make about $125,000 from the remediation, and will acquire a property it wanted anyway.

Looking to expand its airport facilities, the county had applied to the Federal Aviation Administration for a grant to purchase part of the polluted land before the settlement, and it decided to ask the FAA for $1.93 million to buy it all, officials said.

“It’s some property we were looking at anyway for storage and rental space and future aviation needs,” Murphy said.

County officials expect the FAA to reimburse 90% of the county’s purchasing price, and Evergreen Helicopter and other firms that allegedly polluted the land will pay the county more than the remaining 10% as part of the settlement deal.

The extra money will be used to help pay for cleanup costs, expected to run about $250,000, Hurley said.

The seeping fuel tanks were removed in the early 1990s, and environmental tests have shown that contamination on the Oxnard Aero Center property is minimal, Hurley said.

“It was certainly a probability that it would eventually be contaminated,” Hurley said. “(But) the latest tests seem to indicate that it is not a problem.”

But Robert L. McCord, the Ventura attorney representing the Oxnard Aero Center, said the pollution prevented his client from selling the property or developing it.

“The bottom line is that the property was worthless,” McCord said. “No lender with a 10-foot pole would touch a contaminated property.”

The county will probably deal with many more remediation lawsuits in the coming years due to a lack of environmental planning, Hurley said.

“Underground storage tanks do have a limited life span,” Hurley said. “This kind of thing is happening everywhere, and we expect to see more of this.”