There’s More Than One Way to Scuttle an Airport

The people have voted. Twice. The Board of Supervisors has voted. Many times. So, after five years of bitter wrangling that has torn a rift in Orange County at the Irvine border, it seems the transformation of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station into a commercial international airport is a done deal, right?

Well, not exactly.

There are a number of scenarios in which the county government’s plans for an airport at El Toro could unravel.

Although the betting odds on the likelihood of any of these playing out range from “maybe” to “you must be kidding,” South County airport foes are nonetheless working on several fronts to derail the county government’s plans. Anti-airport forces say they have their strategies in place and they say they have the money to execute them. What they don’t have is much time. The Marine Corps is scheduled to leave the base in July 1999. Then the land would be given to the county on a long-term lease--although the base’s 4,700 acres would not become the county’s for good until contamination from 50 years of military use is thoroughly cleaned.

Among the ways in which the future of El Toro could be further cast into doubt:

* If an anti-airport candidate picks up the seat of a pro-airport supervisor in the June 2 primary. This would tip the balance of power on the Board of Supervisors, which has moved the airport plans along on 3-2 votes.

* If a third countywide ballot measure on the airport goes before voters. According to a recent Times Orange County Poll, nearly two-thirds of the county’s voters want another chance to vote on the issue.

* If Irvine, which is staunchly opposed to the airport, manages to annex the base.

* If a “fatal flaw” in the plan to operate an airport were to be discovered.

Here is a detailed discussion of each of those four possibilities:

Balance of Power

A key opportunity for both sides comes next week, when three of the five supervisorial seats are up for election. Anti-airport Supervisor Tom Wilson, who represents the core of South County, appears locked into another four-year term.

Currently, only Wilson and Supervisor Todd Spitzer oppose a commercial airport at El Toro. But the pro-airport majority on the five-member board could switch if one or both of the two other seats--one open and the other held by pro-airport incumbent Supervisor Jim Silva--fall to anti-airport candidates.

“If you had three votes, you could forever not build the thing,” said Paul Eckles, executive director of the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority, a group of airport opponents that has prepared a non-aviation plan for the base that includes a park, a professional football stadium and a high-technology center.

Under Measure A, the ballot initiative approved by voters in June 1994, an anti-airport majority on the Board of Supervisors could change the base’s future use, but only if a 13-member citizens advisory panel determines that an airport is unworkable, or if a federal or state agency ruled that an airport wouldn’t work there.

However, the supervisors could deny further funding for planning the airport, effectively stopping it cold.

All three candidates challenging Silva oppose converting the base to an airport, but Silva goes into the race with a huge incumbent’s advantage. The issue is harder to call, though, in the seat being vacated by Supervisor William G. Steiner, where two candidates oppose the airport, two support it and one is neutral.

The Ballot Measure

Some South County officials, such as Irvine Mayor Christina Shea, champion the idea of a third initiative. And much of the county’s voter population--even in the North--appears to agree.

This scenario would pit the county’s preferred airport alternative--an international facility serving about 25 million passengers a year--against the so-called Millennium Plan, the tapestry of non-aviation uses prepared by the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority.

“If voters are given a real choice, we think our plan is superior and makes more sense for the county,” Shea said.

The Times Orange County Poll found that 65% of county voters favor holding a new election on the airport, and a plurality prefer the Millennium Plan over all the airport options. The poll also found a cool response to the county’s preferred airport plan, with 53% opposing it and 38% favoring it.

Key to the No on El Toro campaign, Shea said, would be convincing voters that pro-airport forces are dominated by business and residential interests in Newport Beach that want to foist noise and pollution from John Wayne Airport onto the residents of Irvine, Lake Forest and Mission Viejo.

For its part, Newport Beach has stood solidly behind an airport at El Toro. Residents and leaders there say it’s only fair that other parts of the county shoulder some of the county’s air-transportation needs.

“We’re going to focus on who’s driving the airport political machine,” Shea said. “You have one city trying to direct where an airport should go for the rest of the county.”

Airport foes claim voters were duped when they passed Measure A, which was largely financed by businessman George Argyros and drafted in large part by attorneys who represented the interests of residents of Newport Beach, who wanted to avoid future expansion of John Wayne Airport.

Airport boosters said the airport was an economic necessity in the dire months after the Board of Supervisors declared the largest municipal bankruptcy in history.

Besides gauging support for the airport, the measure locked into place a political framework that made undoing an airport almost impossible by any means other than another measure.

Measure A put the Board of Supervisors in place as the controlling authority to determine the base’s future, making it the voice that the federal government would heed as the will of the local people. At the same time, for all its authority, the board cannot change the land’s destiny on its own.

South County cities attempted in 1996 to repeal Measure A, but voters resoundingly rejected the second measure. Airport backers said at the time that the second vote should have settled the matter once and for all, but airport foes say the second measure was poorly worded and still offered voters no alternative to an airport.

Qualifying a new measure would entail collecting about 76,000 signatures of registered voters to place it on a regular ballot; supporters would need to get about 152,000 signatures for a special election.

Either is an expensive proposition. Even if signatures could be handled by volunteers, countywide campaigns for both sides could run more than $1 million each, judging by what was spent on 1994’s Measure A.

The last day to qualify a county measure for the regular Nov. 3 election is Aug. 7, according to the registrar of voters.

If that deadline were missed, there would have to be a special election, since there are no regularly scheduled elections in 1999 and the Navy is scheduled to abandon the base in July of that year. The vote would be scheduled 88 days after the signatures are verified. A countywide special election costs about $825,000, Registrar Rosalyn Lever said.

Pro-airport forces say a third initiative would be a waste of money and would fail, just as have the other attempts to scuttle the airport.

“The intelligent votes have been cast,” said Bruce Nestande, a former county supervisor and head of Citizens for Jobs and the Economy, a pro-airport group. “Another vote won’t settle the issue for those people who are hysterical on the airport. If I thought it would, I’d say, ‘Fine, have another vote.’ ”

Annexing the Base

Other anti-airport forces believe a surer way to ground the airport would be to yank the base entirely from county planning by annexing it into Irvine.

This approach is rife with pitfalls, principally because of a convoluted state-mandated annexation process that requires the county and city to first reach agreement on a property-tax split before annexation could ever come to a vote.

“They can’t even get a hearing [on annexation] until they have an agreement from all parties on the property-tax exchange,” said Dana Smith, executive director of the Local Agency Formation Commission, a state-formed board that has control over annexations.

Given the contentiousness between the county and Irvine, it would be hard for both sides to agree on where to have lunch, much less on how to split up taxes. Accordingly, the commission has told its staff not to spend much time or resources on an Irvine request to annex the base because the likelihood of success is so remote.

“Our commissioners have been clear that [the commission] is not going to be used to resolve political land-use disputes,” Smith said.

Airport foe Eckles maintains that annexation remains the most efficient way of wresting the planning process from county control, and believes an agreement could be reached.

“We would argue that the city is the most logical [entity] to be handling the issues about what happens on the base,” he said. “If we could get it annexed, then the city would be designated [the reuse authority]. If I thought anything else was a done deal, I wouldn’t be here.”

Eckles thinks annexation makes so much sense that somehow the city and county could work things out.

For now, the Board of Supervisors has been designated by the Navy as the ultimate government body deciding the base’s fate, unless a third ballot measure changes that. Even if Irvine were to annex the land, it’s doubtful that the federal government would allow the city to change the board’s reuse plan, said Anthony Gallegos, regional director for the Department of the Navy’s Office of Economic Adjustment in San Francisco.

“Even if Irvine annexed, the county still would be” in charge, he said. “We encourage [the county] to get everyone to sit at the table, but it doesn’t mean they have to come to a unanimous decision.”

Annexation aside, Irvine Mayor Shea said there are other ways South County cities could affect the process, including blocking the planned “people mover” system to carry passengers from John Wayne Airport to El Toro, which would require Irvine’s approval.

Asked how likely that was, Shea responded, “Hah!”

The Fatal Flaw

There is a provision in Measure A allowing supervisors to change the airport zoning without a new countywide vote. However, the board can scuttle the airport only if a state or federal agency rules that the airport has a “fatal flaw” or if the citizens advisory committee recommends to the county that the airport is unworkable.

For months, elected officials and activists on both sides of the issue have been trekking to Washington to lobby officials at the Pentagon, the Federal Aviation Administration and on Capitol Hill.

The hope of airport foes is clear: convince a federal agency--either the FAA or the Navy--that the airport is fatally flawed, either because of safety problems, prohibitive costs or environmental concerns.

This is a Herculean task. Congress knitted strong language into the base-closure legislation to remove itself from the politics of the conversion process. The Defense Department and FAA still have oversight roles but have no intention of wading into a local tug of war.

Asked whether the federal government could stop the airport, one of the Pentagon’s point people on El Toro, Rich Anderson, said: “I don’t even know that in theory that we’d want to address that question.”

“What we try to do is say, ‘Based on planning, it looks like this is going to happen and these are the impacts,’ ” said Anderson, a civilian who heads real estate for the Marines. “We don’t try to say, ‘This is bad,’ or, ‘This is good.’ ”

Even airport opponents acknowledge that the federal government is unlikely to declare a fatal flaw. But Eckles said one goal is to persuade the Navy to declare both an airport and the non-airport plan as approved reuses when it issues what is called a Record of Decision on the base, anticipated about December 1999.

“That would leave the door open for different options,” he said.

The person ultimately in control of El Toro’s fate at the Pentagon, deputy assistant Secretary of the Navy William Cassidy, refused to discuss the issue or to allow an underling to do so. Cassidy has met in recent weeks with Orange County officials involved in both sides of the debate.

Quentin Taylor, the FAA’s deputy associate administrator for airports, said the only reason the agency would intervene to prevent a commercial airport at El Toro would be because it was unsafe.

“We make suggestions to them--instructions sometimes--to cure various [planning] ills [but] 99 and 44/100ths percent of the time, they’re able to satisfy our requirements,” he said.

Still another hope of airport foes is that airport planning will collapse because airlines and other aviation businesses ultimately say they aren’t interested in operating there. The county’s assumptions about the number of airline passengers and amount of cargo have come under attack for being exaggerated and unrealistic. Airport foes argue that airlines won’t want to operate flights at two airports only seven miles apart. And they contend that Orange County passengers still will fly from other airports because of less-expensive tickets and more flexibility in schedules.

The Air Transport Assn., which represents the bulk of the major airliners, has been mum on the idea of a commercial airport at El Toro. But while Roger Cohen, the groups’s chief of state and local government affairs, said there are some aspects of the airport plan open to argument, “If you open it up to commercial service, somebody pretty soon is going to operate there.”

Members of the Orange County congressional delegation have stayed on the sidelines, in part because of deep divisions among their constituents, and in part because of federal requirements that reuse be determined by the community.

Reps. Christopher Cox (R-Newport Beach) and Ron Packard (R-Vista) said airport opponents’ best hope is another attempt at the ballot box.

“The Board of Supervisors certainly hasn’t made the final decision on this,” Packard said. “I would venture to say there may be one or two boards of supervisors down the road that will make the decision, not this Board of Supervisors. This is just the beginning of the process.”

Airport opponents agree, saying they intend to circumvent wherever possible a county process they call skewed in favor of an El Toro airport regardless of what the base’s neighbors want.

“At a certain point, you just don’t take it anymore,” said Shea. “There’s a time when you don’t deal with your enemy any more and you go with your own plan.”

Airport supporters, meanwhile, say efforts to stop the airport are futile; they recommend that South County cities instead focus on finding ways to lessen its impact on their lives.

“Their hopes of stopping [El Toro] are slim to none,” said attorney Barbara Lichman, an author of Measure A and organizer of the Airport Working Group in Newport Beach, which engineered the settlement limiting John Wayne Airport’s expansion.

“They need to be thinking about their future and they’re not,” she said. “They need to think in terms of, what can we live with. There is compromise possible, but they have to come to the table.”

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Grounding the Airport

Opponents of a commercial airport at El Toro have come up with a series of plans for derailing it. While the odds are long, the airport still could be undone. Here’s a look at some of the ways:

New Supervisors

Probability meter: Maybe

* 2nd District: Pro-airport incumbent Jim Silva is being challenged by airport doubters Dave Sullivan, Sandra Genis and Ralph S. Silva. The 2nd District voted 3 to 1 in favor of Measure A.

* 4th District: Incumbent William G. Steiner, a critical swing vote on the airport, is retiring. Candidates Cynthia Coad and Lou Lopez support the airport. Paul F. Walker and Steve White oppose it. Eric Woolery is undecided. The district also favored Measure A by a large margin.

* 5th District: Anti-El Toro incumbent Tom Wilson is being challenged by pro-airport John W. Hedges, a Newport Beach councilman. This district voted overwhelmingly against Measure A.

The ‘Fatal Flaw’

Probability meter: Unlikely

* By the county: Measure A allows for the Board of Supervisors to change the airport zoning if a “fatal flaw,” generally safety-related, is found and considered unfixable by a state or federal agency or upon a recommendation by the El Toro Airport Citizens Advisory Committee.

* By the state: A state agency, such as the Department of Transportation, could pronounce some flaw based on the final environmental reviews.

* By the federal government: A federal agency, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Federal Aviation Administration, could pronounce some flaw after the final environmental reviews. The decision to turn over the land to the county for an airport ultimately rests with the Department of the Navy.

Base Annexation

Probability meter: Unlikely

* The application: Irvine will ask the Local Agency Formation Commission to allow it to annex most of the base. The city then could change the county’s zoning.

* The process: The commission voted unanimously to do only the minimum required on Irvine’s application.

* The hurdle: Getting a required agreement with the county on a property tax split, an unlikely proposition.

Going Back to Voters

Probability meter: Maybe

* What it would say: The initiative would ask voters to choose between the county’s preferred airport option (24 million passengers a year) and the non-airport Millennium Plan prepared by a coalition of South County cities.

* The timing: Supporters of a new initiative are mulling a special election for spring 1999.

* The campaign: Promoting an airport alternative would be a costly campaign.

Researched by JEAN O. PASCO / For The Times