Steiner Pulls Support of El Toro Proposal

Saying that airport opponents were trying to set the county up for failure, Supervisor William G. Steiner angrily pulled his support for a plan that would have made it harder to build a bigger airport at the El Toro Marine air base.

Steiner said he and Supervisor Tom Wilson had crafted an agreement late Monday to try to make it nearly impossible for a future county board to build an international airport that could handle 33.5 million passengers a year.

But early Tuesday morning, members of the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority, a coalition of anti-airport South County cities, added language that could have created a so-called fatal flaw and killed any airport plan altogether, Steiner said.

Under voter-approved Measure A, an airport will be built unless the plans contain a flaw that would render the airport unsafe or not viable.

“ETRPA does not recognize a good deal when it is handed to them on a platter,” Steiner said.

The agreement Steiner and Wilson had reached would have effectively taken off the table Alternative D, the largest of four plans the board has considered. The pact appeared to have the support of the entire board, Steiner said.

However, it also would have allowed county lawyers to include a minimal environmental analysis of Alternative D for the 4,700-acre site that the Marines will turn over to the county next year.

The changes proposed by ETRPA would not have allowed the county to analyze any environmental impacts of the large airport, which they believed would have killed Alternative D completely.

But Steiner wasn’t happy. “I am not going to deliberately sabotage the environmental review process,” he said.

By not analyzing the potential impacts of the largest possible airport, county planners could be sued later, county officials said.

“We need to meet certain [state law] requirements,” said Michael Gatzke, the county’s lead El Toro lawyer. Airport opponents “are committed to creating fatal flaws, and they went too far. This was essentially a mousetrap.”

But airport opponents said that the original agreement between Steiner and Wilson had no teeth and that they simply were trying to tighten the language.

By studying the environmental impacts of Alternative D, the county was keeping that option open, said Richard Jacobs, attorney for ETRPA.

“This quite clearly is not an example of ETRPA trying to set up anything, but of helping Wilson come up with language to end discussion of the larger airport,” said Jacobs.

Wilson said he intends to reintroduce the item at the board’s June 2 meeting.

“There is still a chance to salvage this situation,” Steiner said. “I’m still sympathetic to scaling this project down.”

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How They Stack Up

The so-called El Toro airport Alternative D would create by far the most passenger traffic. Here’s how it would compare to the other three alternatives in 2020:

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A B C D % aviation acreage 43 47 48 49 % nonaviation acreage 57 53 52 51 Average daily vehicle trips* 220 283 276 257 Daily jet operations** 513 669 492 787 Annual passengers*** 19 28.8 24 33.5

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* In thousands to or from airport

** Includes domestic and international passenger and cargo

*** In millions

Source: County of Orange