Airport Plan Pits South, North in Orange County

You can’t exactly call it a civil war--in fact, it’s more uncivil at times than anything else--but a proposal to build an international airport in Orange County has touched off a near-rebellion that has strained friendships and families along north-south lines.

It has stirred hot, if premature, discussion of forming a new county, at least in the south where the airport would be located. Some in south Orange County have flirted with the idea of boycotting pro-airport Disneyland. There is even deep discord among Republicans in the county that is their party’s fortress.

All of this in a region that has been Southern California’s unofficial capital of Not In My Backyard-ism. Orange County residents, many of whom are refugees from urban areas, pride themselves on having swapped big-city life and big-city problems for a suburban lifestyle that is, by comparison, tranquil and problem free.

Until now.

Take Tristan Krogius, 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 the county government is aggressively planning to turn El Toro Marine Corps Air Station into an international airport serving about 25 million passengers a year by 2020. That translates into 492 jet takeoffs or landings daily.

“This is a bloody disaster,” Krogius says, and, from his perspective, he is only slightly exaggerating.

So tense has the atmosphere been at times that one anti-airport leader reported a bomb threat.

The airport issue has underscored 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. Among other things, it has pitted the old money of settled north Orange County against the new money in the young and still-growing south.

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

At a recent anti-airport community forum in south Orange 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 think it’s just tragic that’s what people would feel forced to do to have some sort of quality of life.”

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To airport supporters like Reed Royalty, El Toro “represents the maturing of the county.” Tell that to a roomful of people who believe an airport will 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.

But south county, generally defined as Irvine to the San Diego County border, isn’t just anywhere. Here, vast old ranches have been carved into gentrified communities with 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.

The sentiments in south county, which has the most to lose, are tightly strung. Seven in 10 voters there oppose an airport, according to the most recent Times Orange County poll. In the north, 36% oppose an airport, the poll found.

The differences between north and south county are apparent from the air. 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 in the past 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: Most notably, Newport Beach has been a bastion of support, in part because it has put up for years with John Wayne Airport and thinks it’s high time someplace else helps shoulder some of the county’s air transportation needs.

“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. “It will ruin most of south county.”

Throughout the county, the proposed airport is pilloried or praised in supermarkets, 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 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 said. “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.”

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 said.

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 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.”

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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 edge over 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 said, 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 the south.

Bill Kogerman of anti-airport Taxpayers for Responsible Planning said he was jostled when he took ally Bert Hack of 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 that 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 rhetoric increasingly nasty, tactics have gotten both rough and resourceful.

In late 1996, after the Orange 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 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,” Hack said.

There is opportunity for invention, as Project ’99 demonstrated by distributing CDs with 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.”

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 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.’ ”

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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.

Despite the talk of secession--which would be ironic, because Orange County separated, 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.

What will happen to the county if the international airport is built?

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.’ ”

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 Hack of Leisure World, a retired attorney.

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