Developer Wants to Swap for Tustin Base

One of Florida’s wealthiest families is quietly trying to pull off a land swap that would give it the Tustin Marine Corps Helicopter Air Station and three other closing military bases in return for its oil drilling rights under fragile federal wetlands in south Florida.

The Barron Collier Partnership, among the largest property owners and developers in Florida, first pitched the idea to the U. S. Department of the Interior last fall, after securing six drilling permits for the Big Cypress National Preserve, an Interior spokesman said.

In exchange for the mineral rights to roughly 400,000 acres the family previously sold to the government, the Collier company also wants the naval training centers in San Diego and Orlando and the Treasure Island Naval Station in San Francisco.

But surprised city officials in Tustin and San Diego said they doubt whether such a swap would come about.

“I just don’t believe it’s going to happen,” Tustin Councilman Thomas R. Saltarelli said.

A Collier representative visited Tustin in March to talk about the deal, saying she had “commitments of support” from Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt and Vice President Al Gore, said Christine Shingleton, assistant city manager. But the representative left without answering key questions about the firm’s intentions for the 1,600-acre air base.

“We have all these questions and we have not been able to get responses,” Shingleton said.

Interior Department officials distanced themselves from the proposed deal Wednesday, saying they would review it if the Collier family won the approval of both the Defense Department and the communities affected by the base closures.

“We’d like to get the mineral rights under that property,” said Michael Gauldin, the Department of the Interior’s director of communications. “But this is the deal the Collier family is trying to work out. We’re not a player in it.”

Gauldin said Babbitt has not endorsed the land exchange and his name should “not be used to make the deal.”

The proposed swap comes as the Clinton administration embarks on a seven-year plan to restore Florida’s ailing Everglades, which abut the Big Cypress preserve.

Gauldin said the Interior secretary is partly skittish over brokering such a deal after a political scuffle with Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) over a plan to swap part of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station for Irvine Co. land last year, Gauldin said. Babbitt was forced to scrap the plan.

“We learned a lesson there and we don’t intend to get stuck in the same position,” Gauldin said.

Roy Cawley, president of Collier’s real estate division, said Wednesday that “no agreements have been reached” on the proposed swap.

“There are no proposals on the table,” said Cawley, who has toured the Tustin air base. “We haven’t put anything in front of the Department of Defense to look at.”

But, Cawley said, if a land exchange agreement is not reached, Collier will “absolutely” begin drilling on the Big Cypress preserve, which is in Collier County.

“Those are the major assets of our company. We have the mineral rights and we would like to exercise those rights,” he said.

Collier officials have told Shingleton and other officials that a recent Interior appraisal put the value of its mineral rights at $250 million. Neither Interior or Collier officials would confirm that appraisal.

The Colliers, heirs to the fortune of advertising executive Barron Collier, owned the majority of the 575,000 acres the federal government bought in 1974 for the Big Cypress preserve.

In 1988, the Colliers gave the government additional land for the preserve, plus $35 million, in exchange for a parcel of land near Phoenix that included an Indian school. The controversial deal, which required congressional approval, will be completed in December.

The Colliers retained the mineral rights to the land in both cases. Gauldin said he did not know why the federal government agreed to such a deal.

Those mineral rights give the company leverage in any negotiations over the land swap it is now proposing.

While securing permission to drill for oil in the preserve, Cawley said he “talked to the [Interior] Department and asked if there were areas [of the preserve] they would prefer not to have in exploration.”

Interior officials did, so Cawley began surveying available federal real estate.

Cawley said he looked at 40 military installations before tentatively settling on the 1,600 acres in Tustin, the 666-acre training center in San Diego, 2,000 acres in Orlando and the 532-acre lush Treasure Island site in the San Francisco Bay. Cawley said the firm chose sites that were further along in the base conversion process.

“We certainly think Tustin’s a very nice piece of property,” Cawley said. But both San Diego and Treasure Island, he said, have problems.

“We just don’t know what San Diego’s all about, because they don’t know what they want to be,” he said. “Treasure Island is interesting, but from what we understand, part of the island is sinking.”

Cawley said the list also is tentative because none of the military bases have been appraised.

“If I had to give [the chance of a swap] a rating, I’d say its less than 50% because of the unknowns,” he said.

But Joseph Mittiga, special assistant to Orlando Mayor Glenda E. Hood, said Orlando city officials are taking the swap seriously.

“The sense we’ve gotten from the Department of Defense and the Navy is, ‘Yeah, this could happen,’ ” he said.

Defense Department officials handling the base closures did not return calls for comment.

Cawley, who grew up in Long Beach, stressed that his firm, which also hopes to develop the properties, would not be able to do anything without a series of hearings at all levels and would seek public approval of its plans.

He said he has reviewed Tustin’s nearly completed reuse plan and that Collier “would accept that plan as the zoning for the land. . . . If we think something should be changed, we would need to go back to the community.”

The Tustin air base officially is scheduled to close July 1999. The city’s reuse plan includes 4,600 residential units, a community college, a regional park, office, retail space, schools, an 18-hole golf course and a hotel, Shingleton said.

Shingleton held out little hope that the deal would come off that easy.

“Let them put it in writing,” she said.