Airport Backers Going Over Voters’ Heads

Pro-El Toro airport forces have been quietly shopping for a legislator in Sacramento in an effort to amend state law to bar local voters from holding a special election to repeal a 1994 vote for a commercial airfield at the former Marine Corps base.

The two-sentence proposal is blunt. It would revise the state elections code to prevent voters from amending or repealing in a special election “an initiative measure previously adopted by voters concerning the use of a closed military base.” The provision would expire Jan. 1, 2007.

Talk of a special election surfaced this past March after voters overwhelmingly approved Measure F, an initiative requiring county officials to get approval from two-thirds of voters before a new airport can be built. A Los Angeles County judge is expected to decide next month whether the measure is legal.

Regardless of the judge’s decision, the former Marine base is zoned for an airport--zoning that could not be changed except by another countywide vote. The next scheduled countywide election is June 2002.

Airport backers are pushing to have the special-election proposal introduced before an Aug. 31 deadline to submit bills for the current legislative session. If not, they’ll try again next year, said David Ellis, a consultant with the Airport Working Group, based in Newport Beach.

Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Chuck Smith, who supports an El Toro airport, said winning passage of such an amendment--though a longshot at best--would assure that any attempt to rescind the airport’s approval was done at a regular election, when the most voters turn out. “I don’t think anything this monumental should be decided in a special election,” Smith said Thursday.

In taking their cause to Sacramento, airport supporters clearly are hoping to find more friends in the Legislature than they have found lately among local voters. Their efforts illustrate the depths of official worries about the future of an El Toro airport at the ballot box: Public support for the airport proposal has shriveled since that 1994 approval.

So far, though, county officials have disavowed involvement in the proposed special-elections bill. Two other proposed bills would also affect El Toro. One passed the state Senate this week; the other effectively was killed while it worked its way through the Legislature.

Assembly Bill 2078, approved by the Senate on Wednesday and headed for an Assembly vote today, would forbid cities from spending tax dollars to advocate for or against a ballot measure “either expressly or by implication.” The bill is aimed at stopping a repeat of the nearly $4 million spent by four South County cities earlier this year to boost voter turnout for Measure F--efforts airport backers called tax-funded advocacy.

Meg Waters, spokeswoman for the eight-city coalition fighting the airport, said the group is not opposing the bill because the cities didn’t cross the line into advocacy in their voter-education and registration programs.

The third El Toro-related bill, Assembly Bill 1556, stalled in a Senate committee Thursday and isn’t expected to be heard this year. The bill would bar the city of Irvine from annexing the El Toro base for at least 180 days after it is turned over to the county.

County Counsel Laurence W. Watson this month sent a letter to supervisors supporting the bill because it would allow the county to begin renting 853 empty houses at the base without risking moving in new residents who could vote for the base to become part of Irvine.

“This bill is about housing, not about the El Toro debate,” a frustrated Assemblyman Lou Correa, the bill’s sponsor, said Thursday from the floor of the Assembly.

“These houses are rusting on the base,” said Correa (D-Santa Ana). “While we figure out all our grand schemes [over the airport], let’s get these units into use.”

A Senate analysis of the bill posted Thursday on the Assembly’s Web site said the county already can prevent Irvine’s annexation request for the base, by declining to sign a needed property tax-exchange agreement. Without that, “There’s no danger that the new residents of the former military housing could vote in an annexation election,” the analysis said.

The bill was backed by County Supervisors Cynthia P. Coad, Jim Silva and Smith, and by many of the state’s labor heavyweights, whose workers would benefit from union-guaranteed jobs building the airport. It was opposed by Orange County’s three state senators and by an association for state organizations that approve annexations.

Richard Jacobs, who represents eight South County cities opposed to an airport at El Toro, said the county is desperate to have Sacramento step in and solve its inability to sell the airport to local voters.

The anti-annexation bill would have the state usurp a decision traditionally made at the local level, and the anti-advocacy bill is “fraught with all kinds of problems,” he said.

Blocking voters from acting in a special election also is heavy-handed, Jacobs added.

“The county would have the Legislature say that it’s perfectly OK for voters to engage at some point in airport planning, [but] they just can’t change their minds” in a special election, he said. “That’s terrible public policy.”