El Toro Lease Vote Delayed by Lack of Inspection

Ready to approve a lease allowing Orange County to run the El Toro base, frustrated supervisors learned Tuesday that their staff had never conducted an environmental assessment of the property, making the county potentially liable for environmental damage.

Without that examination, the county must rely on one supplied by the Navy, said Supervisor Todd Spitzer, who argued that the county would be unable to protect itself from future lawsuits by tenants.

“Why would anyone in their right mind buy a home without doing an inspection?” he asked.

News that the county had dragged its feet for more than two years and failed to get a license to conduct the assessment was disclosed Monday at the supervisors’ staff briefing--just weeks before the Navy’s Sept. 1 lease deadline.

“It’s been over two years and we could have had the lease language worked out already and an independent assessment done,” said Supervisor Tom Wilson. “Now, we’re in the 11th hour, or the 11 1/2 hour here. This is another example of how poorly the county runs its projects.”

If no lease is signed, the Navy has said it will lock the gates at the former base, which would cut off public use of the horse stables, a golf course, child care facilities and a recreational vehicle storage facility.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Lynne R. Dunn, a Long Beach resident who boards her horse at the El Toro stables, tearfully urged supervisors to reach an agreement.

“Please,” Dunn pleaded, “we have no place to go. If the stables are closed, horse owners like myself will have to face going all the way to San Diego or driving to Riverside to board our horses.”

Marine officials say that 85% of the base’s contaminated areas have been cleaned, which environmental officials do not dispute. The remaining 15% of the contaminated property includes 12 acres containing landfills where solvents were dumped, a large plume of tainted ground water and also underground storage tanks which contain jet fuel and oils, slated for eventual removal.

That cleanup has cost more than $200 million with millions more expected to be spent.

Under base closure law, the Navy is ultimately responsible for base cleanup, said Board Chairman Chuck Smith, who added, “This lease is not going to abdicate it from responsibility.’

Smith, who said he remains optimistic that an agreement can be reached by the Sept. 1 deadline, expressed frustration with the county’s inactivity and the Navy’s lease language.

Not only did county staff fail to conduct an environmental assessment, but Smith said internal planning on the base lease stopped from April 1999 through June 2000, a fact also disclosed at Monday’s briefing.

“We were very upset that no lease negotiations were going on,” Smith said. “The entire blame lies with the county.”

Navy officials said they will continue to negotiate with the county.

During briefings by the county’s legal consultants who had examined the Navy’s lease documents, supervisors were told of the potential liability problems. Spitzer quoted Jim Dragna, one of the legal consultants, as saying that if the county signed the lease, it would be “an absolutely terrible business decision.”

Dragna, who is with the law firm McCutchen, Doyle in Los Angeles, said the county would be responsible for cleaning up any environmental condition aggravated by the county or its tenants during the lease.

Also, Dragna said the lease precluded the county from conducting an environmental assessment without Naval approval. The assessment would have allowed the county to prepare a so-called environmental baseline, a report that would have given supervisors an environmental portrait of the base under current conditions.

Why county staff failed to do their job is uncertain. Both former County Executive Officer Jan Mittermeier and Michael L. Lapin, manager for the airport planning process, are no longer employed by the county.

Rob Richardson, the newly selected director of the El Toro planning office who was promoted from his job of director of public affairs on July 20, declined to provide an answer, saying only that whatever happened before he was promoted, “is an area for someone else to deal with. We need to move forward to address the issues the board had today.”