O.C. Leadership and Measure F

* The Times is to be commended for its editorial “El Toro Report Card: A Failure of Process” (Feb. 13), a long-overdue critique of a process that cannot by the wildest stretches of imagination include the word “planning” anywhere in its label.

The commentary has demonstrated amply that the county’s lack of credibility and competency has served only to degenerate what should have been a rational decision-making process into the basest sort of sociopolitical manipulation. I would speak to the issue of disenfranchisement that crops up again and again in the editorial: The Times opposes Measure F, the Safe and Healthy Communities Initiative, on the grounds that policy decisions should not be conducted at the ballot box. While I would concur in most cases that planning by direct initiative most likely would lead to chaos, what else is left to the disenfranchised when confronted with an obviously stacked deck?

CLAYTON SPADA

Fullerton

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You list many of the arguments that the opponents of an international airport at El Toro have been making for years: the hijacking of the planning process via Measure A; the exclusion of the affected communities contrary to the Defense Department’s own base reuse guidelines; the county’s seven-year record of evasiveness on the unresolved operational questions; the planned two airport system that flies in the face of logic; the refusal of the county to level with the public; the stunning lack of forthrightness and the inept leadership by the board majority. Nonetheless you oppose Measure F, and in a nod to the best of all possible worlds, you add a laundry list of things that should happen.

Do you think the inept county leadership will allow the replacement of the Local Redevelopment Authority with one that represents also the interests of the impacted communities, as you suggest? Do you think the inept county leadership will give the voters another chance to choose between the Millennium Plan or an international airport? A “yes” vote on Measure F represents our best chance to stop this ill-advised airport and regain control of a planning process that deliberately excludes those who stand to lose most.

KAI WULFF

Laguna Niguel

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Why are you whining about South County not having a voice in the process of regional airport planning? We could be now voting on an airport at El Toro or the Millennium Plan. The El Toro Reuse Planning Authority chose to make the issue confusing to the voters by introducing jails and landfills into the equation. Sorry, Times, you can’t pin that on the supervisors.

ANN WATT

Santa Ana Heights