El Toro Debacle at the Top

The convincing passage of Measure F, the ballot initiative requiring that the El Toro airport proposal be put to voters, has left some county supervisors searching in recent weeks for answers on what it all means. Recently, they showed they wanted it both ways, voting to remain “neutral” on the measure at the same time they asked the courts to release the board from compliance with financial restrictions.

No doubt there will be some questions about very specific consequences that need ironing out, such as the actual date the initiative takes effect. However, there is no need to search the Hall of Administration for scapegoats on the question of being ill-prepared to deal with all the ramifications of the measure. The supervisors need not look any farther than their own group. And until the matter of the measure’s constitutionality is adjudicated, the board should comply cooperatively with its provisions.

Recently, some of the supervisors were casting about for whether to blame County Executive Officer Jan Mittermeier or County Counsel Laurence M. Watson for ill-preparedness in dealing with the new law. Surely, the supervisors should have anticipated that the measure might pass, especially in view of widely available polling results. They should have requested that the administrators begin looking into the consequences of the measure.

The reality is that the supervisorial majority of three that has been pushing the international airport proposal never signaled any intention from the beginning to look at alternatives to the big plan. It is precisely for this reason that it took South County cities to push for a nonaviation alternative proposal to be prepared several years ago. As we noted recently, the county has done precious little to anticipate the possibility that it will have to come up with a plan to address the future of John Wayne Airport, which has a cap on passengers and flights that will be lifted in 2005.

On that point, the supervisors have poorly served Newport Beach, the very constituency that most ardently has sought an El Toro airport as an alternative to the expansion of John Wayne Airport. The best the county has been able to do is to float an expansion plan for John Wayne Airport in the environmental impact report that was so wildly out-sized that its only conceivable aim was to scare Newport Beach and Costa Mesa. It has yet to take a measured look at the airport’s future and anticipate the possibility that El Toro might not go through. In fact, county leadership has been so absent that, ironically, it has been the anti-El Toro group that made overtures to Newport Beach, where anxiety understandably is stirring about the fate of John Wayne Airport. A lot of time has been lost, and now the exploration is coming from the ground up, not the top down; former Newport Beach Mayor Tom Edwards has suggested that there may be common ground on county airport capacity.

As for accountability on the consequences of the ballot initiative, the supervisors should not blame the county administrators. There is a strong county executive system, to be sure. But the El Toro question is the most important land issue facing the county since World War II, and the biggest public policy question since the bankruptcy.

Whatever they think of Mittermeier’s role in the architecture of the dual airport system, the buck stops with them. Now that they have been handed a defeat, they can’t say the underlings haven’t kept them informed. Now that taxpayers successfully sued to get reimbursement for the costs incurred in challenging sloppy environmental impact work, it’s high time the county took a more realistic approach to building consensus for future base reuse.

The supervisors have made El Toro the centerpiece of their entire government effort in recent years, to the detriment of full attention to other policy matters. They are responsible for proposing a flight plan that left experts in disbelief, and which now has cost precious credibility that might have gone toward a more scaled-down and politically realistic airport system to serve future aviation demands.

In the end, democracy can’t work in anybody’s favor if it isn’t based on a forthright public conversation. It’s past the time when the supervisors should start conducting it.