Battle Over Competing Airport Initiatives

* It is outrageous that the Board of Supervisors has chosen to consider placing three competing, confusing measures on the ballot next year regarding a commercial airport at El Toro (Nov. 3).

The purpose clearly is to obscure and confuse the existing initiative on the March ballot. Will the supervisors stop at nothing in order to bamboozle the public on the airport issue?

Their move is clearly designed to confuse, not inform, yet it’s our tax dollars funding these measures. The supervisors are spending Orange County taxpayers into oblivion.

PAT BARRY

Irvine

* It is outrageous that the Orange County Board of Supervisors would consider usurping the will of the people in an attempt to confuse the electorate by approving a measure or measures to compete with the Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative, a grass-roots measure signed by 192,000 voters.

Once again, the majority of the board is using its power to confuse the electorate and blur issues in an attempt to force an unwanted airport down the throat of the communities it most affects.

Shame on the board. Truth will prevail, and truth’s light will expose the supervisors’ efforts for what they are: an overt policy of obfuscation doomed to failure.

CRAIG H. BROWN

Laguna Beach

* We have additional proof of the urgent need for an El Toro airport.

According to the Southern California Assn. of Governments, failing to build an airport at El Toro or a larger Los Angeles International Airport would result in the need to rebuild John Wayne Airport to handle four times as many passengers as it now serves (“New Study Has Bad News for Airport Foes,” Sept. 24).

Surely even South County residents cannot inflict that kind of extreme punishment on people under the John Wayne corridor. The small airport cannot accommodate that passenger load without confiscating existing homes, businesses and schools within its path.

This new information is proof positive that the best use for the El Toro property is a new airport. This study should cause every voter to say no to the Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative, which will be on the March ballot.

It is nothing more than a thinly disguised effort by anti-airport activists to stop an El Toro airport, and is just plain bad policy. Orange County needs El Toro.

M. KRONE

Anaheim

* Citizens of Orange County are once again being ignored by our supervisors.

Remember the bankruptcy? The pro-airport supervisors are conducting business as arrogantly as they did then. The hard work by all those who followed the required procedures for the Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative is now in danger of being dismissed by Supervisors Charles V. Smith, Cynthia Coad and Jim Silva.

The possible approval of three confusing ballot measures with the wave of a hand, with no gathering of 190,000 signatures, is despicable and dishonorable and should cost them their jobs. Gov. Gray Davis should intervene.

There is no excuse for this mockery of government. Where has the integrity gone?

The Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative was born because the voices of the citizens have fallen on deaf ears. Let’s return some power to the people who support the government and the county of Orange and its officials.

MARY SCHWARTZ

Santa Ana

* I never have understood the brouhaha over the terrible impact that takeoffs from El Toro to the west on Runway 25 will have on Irvine (“Pilots’ Group Offers El Toro Runway Plan,” Oct. 9).

Planes, large and small, military and civilian, have been taking off from that runway for many years without disturbing Irvine residential areas.

The reason is simple: To avoid John Wayne Airport traffic, planes taking off west from El Toro turned south soon after becoming airborne. They passed well to the east of Irvine’s University Park and Turtle Rock neighborhoods, crossing the coastline east of Corona del Mar.

Before the base closed, I asked one of the Federal Aviation Administration air traffic controllers about these takeoffs to the west. He said, “No problem” with citizen complaints.

It’s too bad the anti-airport El Toro Reuse Planning Authority folks, who seem obsessed with westerly departures from El Toro and are spending an obscene amount of money to kill the El Toro airport project, didn’t kick in some of their surplus dollars so takeoffs to the west could have been part of last June’s demonstration flights.

NORM EWERS

Irvine

* I was under the obviously mistaken impression that to get a proposition on the ballot it was necessary to go out and obtain 192,000 signatures before the Board of Supervisors would take action.

I can’t begin to express my undying appreciation to those paragons of fairness, the county supervisors, now that I see that a committee of one, Los Alamitos Councilman Ronald Bates, has shown that one individual may be able to get his favorite issue before the public by simply asking the supervisors to put it on the ballot.

I would like to publicly announce at this time that my committee, Citizens to Build Los Alamitos/Argyros International Airport Now!, is hereby officially petitioning the Board of Supervisors to put my initiative on the ballot.

My proposition calls for building the obviously much-needed North County international airport at the Los Alamitos Army Airfield without further study or delay.

Los Alamitos has two runways longer than those of John Wayne Airport. The Los Alamitos departure path goes over the totally unpopulated Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and then the Pacific Ocean so that no departure would be over any housing.

There is one other reason the supervisors must put my proposition on the ballot. My committee has twice the number of Bates’ committee: my wife and I.

JACK WEBER

Irvine