Full-Throttle Airport Fight Breeds County Blood Feud

Like a traditional Southerner, Tristan Krogius blasphemes the North for its “subversion of democracy” and its “arrogant and unyielding” government. He defiantly warns of possible secession if the oppressors do not desist in their threat to his cherished way of life.

“This is a bloody disaster,” he fumes. “It means Civil War.”

This is not 1861. It is not the antebellum South of weeping willows, ladies in crinoline and gentlemen in frock coats. And Krogius is no plantation owner anxiously pacing in his high, leathered library, cursing those unchivalrous Yankees.

Krogius is a retired developer who resides in a hilltop home in Monarch Beach with a glazed brick floor and wide windows framing a commanding view of the Pacific Ocean.

To him and tens of thousands of others, North is Santa Ana, the seat of power, where a county government is aggressively planning to turn a cast-off military base in South County into an international airport serving about 25 million passengers annually by 2020 and with 492 jet takeoffs or landings daily.

The proposed civilian airport at circa-1942 El Toro Marine Corps Air Station has ignited a contentious conflict in well-to-do and usually well-mannered Orange County. It has strained friendships and families along North-South lines, stirring hot talk of rebellion and a new, breakaway county. South County’s citizens have mobilized. There are firebrands, bombast and tears of rage.

This verbal cannonade is hardly the moral equivalent of the American Civil War. But the fight over the airport has divided people who once shared a mainly unified vision of the good life and how their county should fulfill its destiny.

The old money of the settled North is now the perceived enemy of the new money in the young and still-growing South. There is deep discord among Republicans in the county that is their party’s fortress. The atmosphere is so tense that one anti-airport leader reported a bomb threat, and there was brief talk of boycotting pro-airport Disneyland, the symbol of all innocence.

The airport issue also reveals fundamentally different longings within the fifth most populous county in the nation: the drive to be a wealthy and dynamic suburban metropolis versus dreams of a quietly ordered, almost idyllic relationship between work and place.

Beyond the rhetoric, there is a very real sense that, should the airport come to pass, the ill will between North and South will become a permanent rift that could taint the county’s decision-making process for decades to come.

Anger, resentment and hurt are everywhere in evidence.

‘People Scream, Their Nostrils Flare’

At a recent anti-airport community forum in South County, Crystal Kochendorfer, president of the Capistrano Unified School District board, told the large audience: “We have friends, we have fellow countians who live in the North. They’re not really an enemy. . . . This wedge has been driven between people who shared the same county up until now. We’ve heard a comment tonight about the possibility of forming a new county. I’ve heard that repeatedly. And I think it’s just tragic that’s what people would feel forced to do to have some sort of quality of life.”

To airport supporters such as Reed Royalty, El Toro “represents the maturing of the county.” Tell that to a roomful of people who believe an international airport would bring their neighborhoods the all-hours demonic shriek of jet airliners, pillaged property values, more air pollution and worse traffic congestion.

During one talk to a South County group, Royalty, president of the Orange County Taxpayers Assn., virtually felt under attack. “People scream, their nostrils flare and they bare their teeth,” he said. “It’s extremely intimidating.”

But South County--generally defined as Irvine to the San Diego County line--isn’t just anywhere. For residents, it is like a homeland to be defended. Here, vast old ranches have been carved into gentrified new communities with big mock-Spanish houses, mostly untroubled schools, unpotholed streets and rolling greenbelts, all of which enticed retirees and upwardly mobile refugees from Los Angeles and this county’s more urbanized north.

There is room for agreement between North and South, even on the airport issue. A recent Times Orange County Poll found that majorities of residents on both sides believe that another election should be held so voters can decide whether an airport should be built at El Toro. Yet sentiment about an airport in South County, which has the most to lose, is tightly strung. Seven in 10 voters there oppose an airport, the poll found, while in the North 36% are in opposition.

See the difference between North and South from the sky. The late 19th and early 20th century northern cities, founded by farmers and small-scale merchants, have grown into one another. They are largely tight grids of short, straight streets where 2 million people live.

In the South, where five of the county’s 31 cities were minted just in the last 10 years, the streets of planned communities look like the curving pattern of a thumbprint. Parks and hills weave around and through neighborhoods. Nearly 700,000 people dwell here. Not everyone in the South opposes the airport, either: Most notably, Newport Beach has been a bastion of airport advocacy, in part because it has put up for years with John Wayne Airport and believes it’s high time someone else helps shoulder some of the county’s air transportation burden.

“We all fear the monstrous overgrowth of our area as symbolized by that airport,” said Jim Davy, president of Clear the Air/NOJETS, a coalition of 48 homeowner associations with more than 120,000 members. “There’ll be all kinds of industry and support industry. It will ruin most of South County.”

Long-term county transportation needs have been studied more than 20 years and planners have always had their eye on the 4,700-acre El Toro base. But it was unrequited lust until 1993, when it was put on the federal base closure list and El Toro became more than a mere fancy.

Now, throughout the county, the proposed international airport is pilloried or praised in supermarket aisles, churches and bars, at business luncheons and sporting events. Often, tense disagreement is as near as the next sentence in the most innocuous, dawdling conversation.

When Joan Bernard and her women’s tennis team played Lake Forest, all went well until the after-game banter touched on the topic. “They really became riled because they knew we came from Newport Beach,” Bernard recalled. “They got wild-eyed, their hair stood on end. But they were nice ladies.”

Bernard’s husband, Ralph, deadpanned: “The carpetbaggers came. Damn Yankees!”

Bob Olds lives in the North but prays in the South. When he attends church in Irvine, “most people don’t bring it up. They know we live in Newport. They don’t want to make an argument.”

Nervous Families With Feet in Both Camps

Families too are left to sort out their feelings over the airport. Nobody’s exactly tossing dinner plates like Frisbees, but when the matter comes up, it’s a little like somebody has spit in the punch bowl and wrecked the evening.

One afternoon at the Krogius home, son-in-law Scott Mason, a Corona del Mar resident who owns an insurance and benefits firm, arrived to pick up his child. “He’s a wonderful guy, but he lives up there,” Krogius remarked.

Mason explained to a visitor, “We don’t talk much about [the airport] because of geography.”

Asked his views, Mason was cautious, saying he understands the South’s sensitivity. Then he expressed an attitude common among North County residents who live near smaller and nearly outgrown John Wayne Airport, just 7 1/2 miles away from El Toro.

Why, Mason asked, should the entire county have the ability to “fly out of my backyard” without somebody sharing the burden? “We have a need for more air transportation,” he said. “I fly a lot, so I like convenience. I’m not thrilled about driving to Ontario or LAX” for a flight.

Krogius’ wife, Barbara, offered wearily, “We even talk about religion, but not the airport.”

And speaking of family feuds, the airport spat has even managed the nearly unthinkable--turning Republican against Republican in a county where the GOP savors a 52%-to-32% voter supremacy against Democrats.

Last month, Newport Beach Councilman John W. Hedges, a Republican candidate for county supervisor, sent a “confidential” letter to fellow party stalwarts saying that the anti-airport organization Project ’99 “is really a front organization” that funds the Tides Center in San Francisco. The Tides Center, Hedges went on, sponsors “ultra-liberal projects” including gay rights and a needle distribution program for drug addicts. Some loyal Republicans who oppose the airport were incensed, among them Krogius.

“The Civil War heats up,” he declared, accusing Hedges of “further screwing up the Republican Party.” Hedges declined to be interviewed for this story.

Airport partisans who shuttle back and forth across the battle line for speaking engagements have found that passion isn’t confined to Southerners.

Bill Kogerman of anti-airport Taxpayers for Responsible Planning said he was jostled when he took ally Bert Hack of Laguna Hills’ Leisure World into the Newport Beach-Balboa area.

“I did a presentation and they were about ready to stone us,” said Kogerman, a former Marine pilot who regularly flew from El Toro. “I thought Bert and I were going to have to go back-to-back and work our way out of the room.”

Kogerman said a car tire was flattened and he received an anonymous phone call. “I got a bomb threat. A guy left a message. ‘They’ve set a bomb. It’s set to go off.’ Somebody said, ‘You better stop working against the airport.’ ”

With the increasingly nasty rhetoric, tactics have become both rough and resourceful.

In late 1996, after the county Board of Supervisors voted to press ahead with converting El Toro, some South County residents and officials talked of economic reprisal. They refused to holiday Christmas shop in Newport Beach or patronize Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm, which favor a commercial airport.

Not much came of the retaliation, but anti-airport activists still hold out the option of formal economic sanction. “People are so mad, talk of boycott is bubbling beneath the surface,” said Hack. Leisure World in Laguna Hills, where he lives, raised $500,000 to help fund the anti-airport campaign.

There is opportunity for invention, as Project 99 demonstrated by distributing CDs that present an assemblage of the full-throttled rumblings, screaming and roars of commercial jets. Literature accompanying the CD says “you can now use this compact disc to do your own in-home noise test.”

Questionable Prospects for a Compromise

All this has gotten rather annoying for the North’s airport supporters, who often point out that countywide voters in 1994 passed (narrowly) a measure calling for a commercial airport and two years later clobbered (by 59.8% to 40.2%) another measure aiming to nullify the first. The vote was starkly along North-South lines.

“When they hear ‘international,’ they think 8th Air Force bombers are going in,” said Ralph Bernard, whose home is near, though not directly under, John Wayne’s flight path. “Commercial airplanes are going to be quieter than [the military jets] they have now” at El Toro.

Some Northerners in a county where the conventional mantra has been growth and jobs feel the South is being elitist, obstructionist and, well, sort of bratty.

“I don’t hear noise, I hear money, it’s good for the county,” said Mike Stevens of Newport Beach.

Complained Olds: “They won’t negotiate, they won’t come to the table. ‘We’ll only do it our way, we won’t cooperate.’ ”

He may be right.

Although the latest incarnation of the El Toro plan has been scaled down, there’s still not much stomach for it in South County, where anti-airport leaders have proposed their own so-called Millennium Plan to turn the surplus military base into a non-aviation complex with a sports facility, museum, high-tech industry and homes.

Except for some sectors of the business community--which is also divided over El Toro--nobody in the South seems to openly support an airport of any stripe.

“Any time you have a jet flying over a house, anything can happen,” said Mel Mercado, an architect who lives in Rancho Santa Margarita, one of the South’s planned communities and a likely candidate for future cityhood.

Airport supporters, he said, “kind of give off this insensitivity. ‘Let us build. We’ll take care of you. Nothing will go wrong.’ ”

Regiments of experts and dilettantes are drenching themselves in data about the airport. Decibel levels. Flight paths. Daily vehicle trips. Pounds of pollutants. And perennial argument about the economic premise of another airport.

Watching silently from the wings are other Orange County residents, many of whom feel left out of the biggest planning decision in the county’s history.

“It’s been a battle between North County wealthy people and South County wealthy people,” said Gil Flores of Santa Ana, who is state director for the League of United Latin American Citizens. “They’ve left us out of the loop.”

Forty percent of Orange County is minority, primarily Latino and Asian, whom Flores believes have an abiding interest in the airport issue. “I think we do have an opinion if we were asked,” he said. “We do need jobs, but are jobs going to be favorable when balanced against pollution and traffic?”

Some feel the angry dialogue is becoming calmer and others suggest they have not yet begun to fight. Some Northerners believe there is hidden support for an airport and that inevitably the South will accept a compromise. And some argue that the fight isn’t really between North and South but between the South and interests in Newport Beach. They believe airport support is soft in the central cities and talk of seeking yet another ballot measure in hopes of smashing the airport plan.

Despite the talk of secession--which would be ironic, since Orange County was created by separating, against strong opposition, from Los Angeles County in 1889--many South County leaders realize there’s not a sufficient tax base to support a government.

“I see less fire-breathing passion in the debates because people see there is a [planning] process and, ‘Yes, our concerns are going to be addressed’ ” in the project environmental impact report, said Royalty of the Taxpayers Assn.

What will happen to the county if the international airport is built and South County feels virtually overrun and occupied?

Unlike the War Between the States, nobody is likely to die over the airport issue, unless somebody bursts a blood vessel arguing.

‘I Don’t Think There’ll Ever Be Forgiveness’

But the wrenching conflict would surely leave scars--years of political tumult, litigation and revenge against the North in general and county government in particular.

Whenever county officials float a bond issue or want to raise taxes, “you can assume it will be revenge time for South County residents,” predicts Mark Baldassare, professor of urban planning at UC Irvine. “If county officials ever need to go to the voters for anything, they can expect a big ‘no.’ It speaks to the level people would be willing to go in terms of payback.”

Perpetual lawsuits could become the guerrilla war to resist the airport at every stage of future development. “It will be litigated far into the future; I know half a dozen areas of possible litigation,” said Leisure World resident Hack, a retired attorney.

“I don’t think there’ll ever be forgiveness,” he said.

South County, painfully aware of its puny political muscle, could become galvanized. There are predictions of greater scrutiny of county decision-making and talk of changing the rules so county supervisors are elected at large and not from districts. Now, only one of five supervisors represents South County.

“You’d have equal representation and make every supervisor accountable to the entire county,” Irvine Mayor Christina L. Shea said. She says of the current majority pro-airport supervisors: “They’re almost marionettes to the big-money guys.”

Yet there could be repercussions in the North, as well, for a missed economic opportunity if the airport is thwarted.

Anaheim Mayor Tom Daly fears for the decades ahead if people don’t rally behind an airport in the name of “the greater good of Orange County.”

“In the past, when Orange County faced a decision whether to grow and prosper or limit its future, it has chosen to grow and prosper,” he said. If the airport is defeated, “we will lose ground relative to other metropolitan areas in the U.S. and the world.”

A dozen miles south of Anaheim, in Irvine, Shea doubts anything would ever be the same again if it were forced upon South County.

“The airport has so shattered everything, it’s hard to see the positive relationships we’ve had with North County,” she said. “If this thing goes forward and becomes an economic disaster, you’re going to have years and years of animosity.”

Every time a jet airliner flies overhead and the windows rattle--if indeed they do--many South Countians will pause to ponder how their region is growing and gaining more political influence. Memories will be bitter and long.

Said Shea: “There’s going to be hell to pay.”