Cities Rethink Land Use by Base

With El Toro Marine Corps Air Station shut and its runways empty, the cities next to the base are encouraging development on land where most building has been restricted for 56 years because of military jet noise.

Last week, the Irvine City Council took the first step toward allowing homes, schools and child-care centers in the large Irvine Spectrum business park, which bumps up against the south and west boundaries of the airfield.

Lake Forest has three building projects pending on the southeast side of El Toro, and two south Orange County school districts are moving ahead with plans to build elementary schools under proposed flight paths.

The aim is clear: Invite children, parents, teachers to an area around a now quiet base and they will help to throw monkey wrenches into county plans for a commercial airport at El Toro.

“It’s the equivalent of having Saddam Hussein ring little children around military installations in the Gulf War as a disincentive to bomb,” said Mark Petracca, a UC Irvine political science professor and El Toro opponent.

“It’s a perfectly good strategy,” he said. “If you succeed in stopping the airport, it’s not a problem. If you don’t, it’s buyer beware.”

Irvine Councilman Larry Agran said the council’s vote to initiate zoning changes for the Spectrum “would make a real community out there.”

The commercial and office center is a jewel for the Irvine Co., which owns the property that houses 2,500 companies with 50,000 employees so far. The development company supports the zoning change and already has a Houston businessman ready to move his private school and child-care center there.

“If it hadn’t been for military operations at El Toro, these are uses that we would have pursued a long time ago,” Irvine Co. spokesman Paul Kranhold said.

The Marine base closed in July after 56 years of operation. Since 1993, after the base was put on a military installation closure list, the county has moved ahead with plans to build an international airport against the wishes of South County residents near El Toro. Current plans call for it to be Southern California’s second-largest airport, serving 28.8 million passengers a year by 2020.

Rezoning would add pressure on the county to allow development in the 18,000-acre buffer around the 4,700-acre base, bringing in more critics of airport plans. The county wants to maintain the no-build restrictions in the buffer area.

So far, Irvine has been the most aggressive in pursuing development changes around the base. A required environmental study of Irvine Spectrum changes should be completed early next year. According to state law, that review must take into account other pending projects, including the airport.

“If it’s an impediment to the El Toro airport,” Agran said about developing the area, “that’s just frosting on the cake.”

In Lake Forest, the City Council referred three building projects to the Orange County Airport Land Use Commission, a state-created panel that decides land-use issues around airports.

The commission has said that it will approve waivers for El Toro-area projects on a case-by-case basis. Two of the Lake Forest landowners haven’t decided what to put on their properties but still want a green light to build. Another owner, Baker Ranch Properties, wants to build a commercial development.

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Councilman Richard Dixon said his city decided it would be better to send property owners to the commission, and go through the lengthy process of changing its general plan later. The city’s planning blueprint retains zoning that bars or restricts building in areas that are subject to jet noise and crash hazards.

There are two other Lake Forest parcels closer to the base, but one is empty and the other has low-occupancy commercial buildings. For the city to rezone them and encourage homes or schools there would be too “in-your-face,” said Dixon, an airport opponent.

“If I were a homeowner and I moved in there and the planes started flying over, I’d start looking to go after somebody--and it probably would be the city,” he said. “[Allowing homes] would be slightly irresponsible on my part as a council member.”

But keeping the old building restrictions in place for much longer, especially in those areas with little threat of future high noise, could land the county in court, Dixon said. Cities near the El Toro base, the former Tustin helicopter base and even the Los Alamitos Air National Guard station, which remains open, are challenging county-imposed development restrictions based on military operations that the cities say no longer apply.

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Several South County school districts, meanwhile, have become more aggressive in the anti-airport fight. Last month, Capistrano Unified, Irvine Unified and Saddleback Valley Unified school districts became associate members of the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority, a coalition of eight anti-airport cities.

Capistrano Unified and Irvine Unified are planning new schools near proposed flight paths. Capistrano plans to put a school in Aliso Viejo under arriving jets; Irvine plans to build one in its Northpark community, just to the west of El Toro’s northern departure runway.

Schools near the base were subjected to even worse noise from high-performance military jets, but those flights were infrequent.

Capistrano Unified Superintendent James Fleming said demonstration fights with commercial aircraft in June at the base were a wake-up call that airport noise would be even worse than expected.

“We now have definitive scientific data detailing the educational and health effects of airport noise on schoolchildren,” Fleming wrote in a letter to the Los Angeles Times. He said studies show children distracted by noise don’t read as well as those in quieter schools.

If airport noise is so harmful, the districts should put a halt to their school plans, pro-airport consultant David Ellis said. Proceeding with the schools is a tacit acknowledgment that the noise won’t be that bad, he said.