With No International Airport, O.C. as World Player Won’t Fly

The decline and fall of Measure S on the March ballot may or may not mean that an international airport will be built in Orange County. One thing we can be assured of, however, is that the future will vary dramatically with the choice.

We in Orange County tend to think of Los Angeles as an object of pity: high unemployment, high crime, high pollution, etc. One of our greatest virtues is not being Los Angeles.

Yet salaries in Los Angeles have always been higher than in Orange County despite the former’s widespread poverty, and that shows no signs of changing. As the perceived hub of Southern California, Los Angeles attracts the national and international attention, some of it grudging, befitting that status.

Orange County, on the other hand, is an adjunct to Los Angeles; in the scheme of things, an afterthought. In commerce, industry and tourism, Orange County is a day trip, an “oh, by the way.”

Our fortunes rise and fall with Los Angeles, albeit at a lower level. And when Los Angeles shoots itself in the foot, we feel the pain.

We’re certainly not alone in being dominated by a larger and scruffier neighbor. For instance, there is the Nassau-Suffolk County area on Long Island.

Closer to JFK than is Orange County to LAX, it is similarly proximate to international oblivion. Most Americans could as easily find Andorra on the map as Nassau County. Yet, the area has a similar population and economic vitality to Orange County’s. It similarly plays second fiddle when there’s only one fiddle to be played.

Orange County also barely intrudes on the national consciousness. It might elicit an “Isn’t Disneyland there?” or now “Isn’t that the place that went bankrupt?” in New York, Boston or Chicago, but little more.

There’s no reason we can’t go on like this for the foreseeable future. For a large metropolitan area, Orange County is not bad. But if we want to be something more than an outpost, we’ll have to shake off the torpor.

Experience has shown that an acceptable international airport is a sine qua non for an area to come of age. Dallas-Fort Worth is often cited as an example of a region that changed substantially after one was built, but the fact is that even the great cities would wither without such service. Orange County won’t necessarily become a world player merely by building an airport at El Toro, but it has no chance without one.

Opponents of the airport are fond of saying it could cost $2.5 billion, but that might be wrong. It will likely cost more than that, what with reconfiguring runways, restructuring freeways and buying out thousands of homeowners. But if we want a shot at an independent and better future, the airport would be a bargain at five times that price.

To assert itself globally, Orange County will have to grow up in many other ways as well. For one thing, it must jettison the bucolic-sounding “Orange County.”

For a geographical area to be recognized internationally, it must have a recognizable city at its center. We don’t, but we could. If our four largest cities, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Huntington Beach and Garden Grove, and possibly a fifth, Orange, were melded together before the 2000 census, an identifiable city having the talismanic population of 1 million would result.

Many other more minor changes will have to be made, of course. An area that fancies itself as a destination tourist attraction must do more than talk to make it happen.

For instance, Orange County has fewer than two-thirds as many golf courses as the Palm Springs area, despite having many times the population.

Obviously, none of this will occur if Orange County remains the balkanized concatenation of feuding fiefdoms it always has been.

When UC Irvine several years ago proposed to build an on-campus hospital that would have been an international beacon and an economic powerhouse, it was instantly opposed by an amazing cast of characters. There was Hoag Hospital, concerned about being buried by the competition; there were politicos, outraged about not having been consulted; there were local sharpsters, looking to extort a piece of the action to drop opposition.

To reach its potential, Orange County will have to put away the childish things of the past. It’s our future and our choice.