El Toro Fight Pattern

As if the opponents of a proposed airport at the El Toro Marine base don’t have enough to worry about.

Activists battling an expansion of Los Angeles International Airport in their backyard have begun fighting to put an airport in Orange County’s.

“It’s the only equitable way to do it,” argues El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon, whose city sits smack under the LAX flight paths.

Gordon and members of LAX Expansion No! brought their crusade some 35 miles south last week, marching into an Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting to urge them to share the pain.

“We already shoulder a great deal of the Orange County burden,” Gordon said. “And we’re not happy about it.”

The fight over El Toro is no longer a skirmish between Orange County communities, but a regional war that increasingly is balkanizing suburbia.

Gordon’s group has discovered what planners have known for years: Get them to build it somewhere else and the pressure in your neighborhood is off.

Calling it “environmental justice,” LAX foes argue that building an airport at El Toro would reduce the need to expand LAX and is only fair considering that hundreds of Orange County residents use the Los Angeles airport every day.

Their argument lies in the distribution of airline passengers heading to and from Orange County. While John Wayne Airport will handle about 7.5 million passengers this year, 12 million Orange County travelers will have hopped onto local freeways to use LAX, according to industry estimates.

Orange County residents’ growing appetite for airline flights, particularly by business travelers, has added pressure to expand LAX, Gordon said. If El Toro is built, that pressure would be off LAX because most passengers could be handled closer to home, he said. As planned, El Toro would become Southern California’s second-largest airport and accommodate nearly 30 million passengers annually.

Last week, El Segundo sued Los Angeles, arguing that piecemeal LAX expansion in recent years violated California environmental laws. In the last 10 years, the airport has grown from 40 million passengers a year to about 63 million annual passengers this year--the fourth busiest airport in the world. The expansion would boost LAX to more than 90 million travelers a year.

It is unfair for the South Bay alone to deal with the corresponding burdens of traffic, pollution and noise, Gordon said. Those effects should be spread across a wider region as other areas also benefit from the economic activity provided by airports.

Gordon has become increasingly vocal in recent months about Orange County’s responsibility to build an alternative to John Wayne Airport, which is limited to 8.4 million passengers a year through 2005.

His outspoken views landed him in an oral tussle last month with anti-airport Assemblywoman Patricia Bates (R-Laguna Niguel) at an Assembly hearing in Santa Ana on regional airport needs.

The idea of “sharing the pain” of airports is a sound one in concept, opponents of the proposed El Toro airport said last week. But they faulted LAX opponents for wanting to impose a major airport on an area that doesn’t want it instead of fully using airports that already exist.

“In the interest of environmental justice, you do want to spread out the burdens and benefits,” Irvine Councilman Larry Agran said. “But [Gordon] needs to visit the existing facilities that have lots and lots of room for expansion.”

Agran agreed that the communities near LAX shouldn’t have to endure such a major expansion as has been proposed by the Los Angeles Department of World Airports. He also agreed that Orange County should accommodate more passengers--by fully using John Wayne Airport after court-sanctioned limits are lifted. County consultants have said the airport could handle up to 14 million people a year without enlarging the airport.

Agran also questioned forecasts by the Southern California Assn. of Governments showing airline travel in Southern California doubling in the next 20 years. He said the forecasts are based on computer models that have been consistently wrong in past years.

Gordon and other LAX expansion foes said southern Orange County residents are ignoring the benefits of airports by focusing solely on the harm. Despite arguments raised frequently by El Toro airport opponents, their neighborhoods wouldn’t be ruined by an airport at El Toro, just as LAX hasn’t ruined El Segundo, he said.

“The average person here makes $90,000 a year and lives in a $400,000 home,” said Gordon, who cringes at criticism that areas near LAX are blighted and riddled with crime, traffic and graffiti.

“Our community certainly isn’t ruined by LAX,” he said, “but we don’t want it to become overrun.”

At last week’s Board of Supervisors meeting, LAX neighbors said they simply have endured all the airplanes they can.

“You want to see [airport] impact, take a look at my neighborhood,” said Mike Stevens of Inglewood, the president of LAX Expansion No! He then pointed to maps showing acres of undeveloped land around El Toro, compared to 40 schools and thousands of homes already sandwiched within LAX’s highest noise zones.

“We’re just asking you to carry your fair share,” Stevens said.