Orange County Voices : COMMENTARY ON LEADERSHIP : It’s Time for the People to Provide Vision, Activism on El Toro : Supervisors sleepwalked through the base reuse issue. Residents need to lead on this matter so leaders will follow.

Weak, disengaged elected officials can be very costly. The obvious case in point is the Orange County Board of Supervisors, whose sleepy detachment plunged the county into bankruptcy. The cost: at least $1.7 billion and incalculable human misery for years to come.

In a curious way, the bankruptcy has eclipsed the other big story of failed supervisorial leadership: the board’s pathetic inability to point the way to a credible reuse plan for the soon-to-be-closed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

In fact, because of the supervisors’ endless fence-sitting and political ineptitude, in nearly two years’ time we’ve made no progress in fashioning a sensible conversion plan for the 4,700-acre base. The cost in this case is the cost of a missed opportunity; we’re missing the opportunity to embrace an El Toro reuse plan that could bring a half century of economic prosperity to Orange County, thousands of jobs, breakthroughs in modern transportation technologies and unprecedented environmental restoration.

As our hapless supervisors look on, what we face instead is the goofiest of all prospects: an unneeded, unwanted and unaffordable commercial airport at El Toro.

How did we get into this mess? And how can we get out?

When the federal government decided to close the El Toro base by 1999, Orange County was presented with a major challenge; thousands of jobs would be lost and there would be widespread dislocation. But the county was presented with a golden opportunity as well; we could lift our sights, dream a little, and plan for the long-term development of central and southern Orange County.

If even one county supervisor had offered a vision of what the El Toro base could become, public opinion and public support could have been quickly galvanized. Mayors and council members and ordinary citizens could have been drawn into a popular planning process.

But none of the supervisors--not one--stepped forward.

From the sidelines, a number of us tried to supply the vision, but to no avail. Whenever I offered my own idea for the reuse of El Toro, it seemed to draw a lot of popular support, but apparently not enough to impress the supervisors. My idea was to enlist the Irvine Co. or a consortium of developers to swap their nearby agricultural lands and other land holdings--placing them in a land conservancy--in exchange for rights to develop the El Toro base and make a major profit.

Under my plan, the development of the base should be subject to only three key conditions: First, no commercial airport could be built at El Toro because this would be development in violation of “good neighbor” policies--the environmental devastation to nearby cities would be intolerable.

Second, as a condition of development, the cleanup of toxics at the huge base would have to begin immediately--why not put to work thousands of technicians and millions of dollars in federal Superfund money and make El Toro a model of environmental restoration?

The third and final condition I suggested for redevelopment of the Marine base would be to accelerate railway construction in the Irvine/El Toro area. By making use of available federal and state funds, this region could become a national center for designing, building and selling the modern rail technologies that will characterize the 21st Century.

When we needed a vision for the redevelopment and reuse of El Toro, the supervisors provided foot-dragging. When we needed leadership, they were nowhere to be found. By the time they finally voted to create the nine-member El Toro Reuse and Planning Authority, which included four votes allocated to cities bordering El Toro, it was already too late.

Millionaire developer George Argyros, a longtime proponent of a commercial airport at El Toro, saw his chance. He put together an initiative, Measure A, that would require county planners to set aside roughly half of the El Toro base for a huge commercial airport. And then he personally laid out the hundreds of thousands of dollars necessary to win a narrow countywide election victory last November.

To put it bluntly, George Argyros and his allies bought the election. In the bargain, they evidently bought the silence of the supervisors as well--even those who understood that the expense and environmental damage caused by a second commercial airport in Orange County couldn’t possibly be justified.

If anything is to be salvaged from this mess, the salvage operation will have to be organized by ordinary residents. Fortunately, that’s begun to happen. Scores of residents are circulating an initiative to repeal Measure A and, once and for all, bury the El Toro airport idea. Then we can revisit “the vision thing” for El Toro and, belatedly, begin to do some honest planning for the future.

My guess is that the effort to repeal Measure A will succeed, unless the initiative organizers make the fatal mistake of again expecting one or two of the supervisors to help. Even newly elected Supervisor Marian Bergeson has flip-flopped and taken so many positions on the airport that, in the words of a local wag, “she doesn’t know whether she’s hittin’ or pitchin.’ ”

Let’s not have any illusions about getting help from local mayors or city council members, either--these folks haven’t exactly been piling up awards for political leadership in recent years.

The best bet is for the resident activists who are organizing the initiative to repeal Measure A to remember the words on a bumper sticker popular in the early 1980s: “If the people lead, the leaders will follow.”