Co-Pilot Lapin Asked to Control El Toro Landing

Michael L. Lapin, as a familiar face in Orange County airport circles, has the trust of county leaders to meet looming deadlines and end delays that jeopardize plans for the proposed airport at the El Toro Marine base.

But Lapin, hired this week as second-in-command of the El Toro planning office, has no illusions that he’s going to work any miracle.

“I wasn’t brought in to be the medicine man to cure this thing overnight,” Lapin said Thursday.

Airport backers are citing his expertise as a real estate lawyer and developer to manage the El Toro planning team better. Lapin, an Irvine resident, has developed 1.5 million square feet of shopping centers and restaurants in California. He also has consulted on commercial projects out of state.

He said his strengths are his familiarity with financing issues and navigating regulatory bureaucracies.

But his major Southern California project, Shoreline Village in Long Beach, was taken over by creditors in 1994 after falling behind on loan and rent payments.

He said the investment in the restaurant and shopping complex turned sour after the recession in the early 1990s and the bankruptcy of an anchor restaurant. The village was taken over in foreclosure by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co., which still operates it in the downtown Long Beach harbor area.

Northwestern officials wouldn’t comment on the investment group that Lapin headed. The city said it has since been repaid $430,000 in back rent.

“Shoreline Village is doing very well now,” Lapin said.

He said he helped develop several smaller commercial projects in Northern California.

For the past 12 years, Lapin has served on the county’s Airport Commission, stepping down just two months ago. That experience allowed him to rub elbows with the commission’s past chairman, Gary Proctor, and the airport’s past director, Jan Mittermeier.

Mittermeier now is the county’s top administrator, and Proctor chairs the El Toro Citizens Advisory Commission, a board that advises the county on the conversion of El Toro to a commercial airport.

Lapin, 60, was given a six-month renewable contract, effective May 1, to take over critical aspects of El Toro planning. Besides facing delays and project deadlines, the county still has no agreement to take over the 4,700-acre base after the Marines leave July 2.

Lapin’s $170,000 annual salary makes him the third outside consultant brought onto the El Toro team to earn more than their boss, project manager Courtney Wiercioch, who makes $102,000 a year.

Supervisor Charles V. Smith, the board’s chairman, said paying high salaries is a fact of life for public entities that need consultants from the private sector.

“You have to pay if you want to get the expertise,” Smith said. “That’s just the way it is.”

Managers for other large public works projects have been paid considerably more.

Former Long Beach city manager James C. Hankla is paid $115,200 a year for half-time work as chief executive of the Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority, which will streamline freight travel from the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to transcontinental rail hubs in downtown Los Angeles. Timothy B. Buresh, director of engineering on the $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor project, earns $225,000 a year.

John Driscoll, the chief operating officer for the Los Angeles Department of Airports’ four airfields--Los Angeles International, Palmdale, Van Nuys and Ontario--is paid $199,000 a year.

On the other hand, Ginger Evans was a civil engineer for the city of Denver when she was hired in 1986 to become manager of master planning for construction of Denver International Airport. As a city employee, she was paid $60,000 a year at the start. When she left after the project opened in 1995, she was making $90,000 a year.

“If you’re getting $170,000 in the Los Angeles area, for most people in the private sector, you’re doing it for public service,” Evans said Thursday. She is now a private consultant in Denver.

Lapin’s charge in the next six months is to achieve results in two critical areas. The first is resolving a pending snag in obtaining approval from the state Lands Commission for the Sheriff’s Department to patrol the base after July 2. The matter was considered routine but has been on hold since airport foes submitted legal challenges to the approval.

The second is obtaining a master lease with the Navy allowing the county to take over the base on an interim basis. The county had expected to have had a lease signed by now. The Navy is expected to deed the property to the county sometime in the next few years.

Lapin also will coordinate the county’s El Toro consultants and employee teams and devise ways of meeting critical deadlines and planning approvals.

Proctor said Lapin “comes in very well qualified.”

“I’m extremely concerned about the delays,” Proctor said. “The staff is not anticipating problems and dealing with them. We’re not building a nuclear reactor here.”