Around El Toro, They Already Feel Under Siege

Below the path of what one day may be a steady stream of commercial jets are strawberry fields and markets, churches and strip malls, and row upon row of neatly lined homes--occupied by people who are frustrated and angry, but mostly resigned to an international airport at El Toro.

Commercial pilots arriving at a proposed new airport are expected to pass over the Pacific coastline and quickly lower the planes over eight miles of land, from Dana Point--where residents will barely hear a rumble, county officials say--to Laguna Niguel, Aliso Viejo and Laguna Hills, where neighbors are bracing for the sound of screaming engines from which they’ll have no respite.

When the planes depart, Irvine, Lake Forest and Mission Viejo residents, as well as those living in the foothill communities, can expect the same treatment, according to environmental studies.

In the aftermath of the Orange County Board of Supervisors’ recommendation of an international passenger and cargo airport at the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, everyone living beneath the airport’s proposed flight paths are on edge.

It is along the hilly, landscaped roads of Aliso Viejo south of the Marine base, which will close by 1999, that neighbors have especially begun showing signs of resignation that an airport is inevitable.

Kip and Janie Canton of Aliso Viejo said a neighbor on Surfbird Lane received two “low-ball offers” on his stately, two-story house with a backyard view of hillside homes, gentle mountains and, in the not-so-far distance, a looming stretch of concrete lined with lights.

“Both offers came with a copy of the [airport’s] proposed flight plan stapled to them,” Canton said. “The project hadn’t even been approved yet, and that’s what we were getting. Imagine what we’re in for.”

The neighbor has since taken his home off the market, the Cantons said. Most of Laguna Audubon’s premier streets, as any map will show, are in line with the proposed airport’s waiting runway.

There is irony too in Aliso Viejo, where construction, on apartments, single-family homes for $150,000, parks and schools, continues to plow in the southern part of the city just beneath the flight plan.

But on Aliso Creek Road, which worms in and out of the proposed arrival pattern, residents and workers say the excitement they once felt for the planned community’s future has taken a leave of absence.

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Stan Smith, who bought a two-bedroom condominium off Autumnglen Drive five years ago, said he and his wife couldn’t wait to move into the new community with no shortage of palm trees and plenty of ocean breezes. They tolerated the occasional El Toro military planes flying above, but said they’d always had relief from the noise after 10 p.m.

With a major international airport as his newest neighbor, the planes will be flying constantly, 24 hours a day, Smith lamented. Pollution will sink in, along with the nagging worry of an air disaster literally in their backyard, he said.

“But we can’t move,” said Smith, a retired Los Angeles Police Department officer. “Who would we sell to now? We’ve shrugged our shoulders and resigned ourselves. . . . This thing is going to happen.”

Kevin West moved to a new home on Larkspur in Aliso Viejo two months ago.

“People are sort of sizing things up,” West said, adding that he’d hoped his residence would be “a little off-center” from the airport’s planned approach path but wound up being almost directly underneath.

He said he’s more worried about what his well-groomed neighborhood is going to look like in a few years--homeowners could decide to move, bringing renters or residents who “aren’t the greatest-quality neighbors.”

“I just don’t know what a steady stream of planes coming in overhead is going to do,” said West, a computer software businessman who travels often. “We have a lot of jet noise here now. I can only hope it won’t be unbearable.”

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Closer to the Marine base, an empty valley with scarce vegetation divides the two-mile strip south of El Toro Road and Moulton Parkway. But as quickly as the two roads meet, mention of the airport project fuels a new climate of bitterness and fear among residents.

Below this portion of the flight pattern sits a golf course, the densely populated retirement community of Leisure World and a cluster of churches, all of which surround Moulton Parkway. The road rolls directly north toward the air station for more than a mile before cutting west into Irvine near the San Diego Freeway.

Along Moulton Parkway, mobile home parks, staggered apartment buildings and an array of shopping centers and businesses line the street through Laguna Hills. The area is less than two miles south of the air station--the most populated residential community this side of the 4,700-acre site.

While practicing alone on a slightly damp putting range, Sam Margolin complained about the new airport in the polite and joking manner of a happy 83-year-old. Margolin and his wife, Vikki, are among the 22,000 residents who live in Leisure World.

“Our elected officials must think everybody here is deaf and dying,” Margolin said, stroking a Colonel Sanders-style goatee. “It’s absolutely not true. We’re just trying to enjoy life until we pass on.”

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A roaring plane that Margolin estimates is “as big as a two-story building” streaks by overhead, and the retired contractor explains a standard procedure among residents at Leisure World: making a “time-out” hand signal whenever aircraft approach so nobody misses a part of the conversation.

“When this new monster opens up, we’ll be time-outing every five minutes,” he said. “Nobody will get a word in edgewise.”

Then there is Pat Brooks, living in a Lake Forest subdivision called Serrano Park about two miles from the Marine base’s perimeter, with a brand new set of worries: plummeting property values and airline crashes.

She’s already gotten used to the noise from the military jets that fly overhead.

From her home near Trabuco Road and Paseo Sombra, jet aircraft fly just several thousand feet overhead and the racket can often shake the windows.

“I think this airport idea is terrible. My windows shake when jets fly over now,” the 36-year-old homemaker said. “If they want to put the airport in, let them buy my condo and pay me the $224,000 I paid for it.”

But Stacia Washausen, 32, who also lives in Lake Forest’s Serrano Park, really can’t believe her bad luck. She figured she had escaped the headache of living near an airport years ago when she and her husband decided not to move to Torrance.

“Torrance was too near to LAX,” Washausen said, “so we moved here to Orange County instead, where we sacrificed to pay top dollar for a home. . . . I’d like to sit those Board of Supervisors next to an airport and let them see and feel how it is.”