Scouting Out El Toro

The civilians from Orange County have stationed themselves inside the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station well in advance of the military’s scheduled departure in July.

Operating inside Building 83, an innocuous blip on the vast base, county agents are taking inventory of the real estate and other property at one of the nation’s largest military sites earmarked for a return to civilian use.

And they must move quickly.

Orange County government is in a race against time to photograph, inspect and log more than 650 buildings, a golf course, a movie theater, three swimming pools and 1,183 housing units on the 4,700-acre base.

The county needs to know what’s there before it can begin leasing out the facilities, which it hopes to do starting in July.

“Basically, El Toro is a city, a self-contained city” that housed more than 10,000 Marines at its peak, said Jim Ritchie, a retired Marine colonel at El Toro.

Ritchie now works for Cabaco Inc., an Arizona firm the county hired for $1.8 million to take stock of the base. Cabaco also will maintain the buildings and other base properties, such as the golf course and the officers’ club, until the county is ready to develop them.

“Cabaco needs to figure out the inventory, and there’s plenty out there, from swimming pools to even a giant warehouse that’s refrigerated and right by a railway,” Ritchie said. “They have to figure out if the buildings are falling down or in great shape and if they are marketable.”

Regardless of whether El Toro is developed into the international commercial airport the county is proposing, it will take perhaps as long as three years, he said, before the federal government hands the base over to the county.

The county is negotiating with the military to operate the base in the period between July and the time the property is turned over. During the interim, the base will still belong to the federal government.

“We hope that during the interim use period, we utilize the properties instead of simply letting the gates shut,” said Gary Simon, the county’s manager for the El Toro property. The county wants to lease out office and warehouse space available at the base.

“We should be able to get some companies in here to help attract jobs,” he said, and possibly “keep some of those jobs in the long-term.”

Cabaco already has fielded phone calls from interested businesses, including Hollywood producers. At El Toro, producers can shoot inside jet hangars and warehouses and also provide housing for actors and crew.

Last week, Cabaco entered an agreement with the federal government to operate the base golf course, horse stables and other recreational facilities until the county takes over. Without the agreement, the golf course, popular with retirees, might have been closed before July, said Hector Armenta, Cabaco’s president.

Revenue from leases would cover the cost of base maintenance, which could be as much as $10 million a year, Simon said.

Cabaco also has brought in Dames & Moore engineering firm in Los Angeles to re-create on computer a virtual El Toro base.

By hitting a key on his keyboard, computer whiz Ali Diba from Dames & Moore brings up exterior and interior photographs of each building, floor plans, sewer hookups, telephone and electrical junction boxes.

“You want to see how the building looks from an aerial shot?” Diba said. “We have those too; we can zoom in and out on each building.”

It wasn’t always so.

When the county first took a look at the military’s “archaic” filing system, the civilians inside Building 83 shook their heads, said Mark B. Morgan, a real estate analyst for the county.

“The military had these old documents yellowed with age,” Morgan said. Many date back more than a half-century to when the base was built in 1943. He said they were kept in wooden cabinets stored in a vault.

“We had to work fast,” Morgan said. “Unfortunately, when the Marines go, so do the documents.”

Without the floor plans and details of real estate on the base, it would have made it extremely difficult to determine what would be marketable and what should eventually be demolished, Morgan said.

The contractor put several people at a time in the vault where they plucked everything and photographed it with digital cameras, then scanned the images into Diba’s computer.

The county’s agents are not finished. Local groups and private nonprofit organizations have started telephoning. “They’ve been requesting use of this building or that theater,” Ritchie said.

A volleyball league, for instance, is seeking use of a jet hangar for tournaments. An Irvine swim club is interested in the Olympic-sized swimming pool.

Already, one high school has used a warehouse to construct their school’s graduation night props and an Orange County sheriff’s auxiliary borrowed the auditorium. Children’s Hospital of Orange County plans to hold its fund-raising play at the base theater.

“Those projects benefit the community,” Ritchie said, “Our goal is to have the base pay for its own maintenance and management, and hopefully allow nonprofit groups to come in and use some of the facilities free.”