Candor for El Toro

The anniversary of the closing of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station has prompted some second-guessing about what might have been had the planning process gone more smoothly. There also is some wishful thinking at the Hall of Administration about the discredited big international airport plan, and with it, a failure to recognize the deep problems with the county’s approach to base reuse.

The recent one-year mark saw county supervisors in the throes of realigning the organizational chart for El Toro planning. The Board of Supervisors took control of airport preparations away from former County Executive Officer Jan Mittermeier, and that was enough to precipitate a crisis over her tenure. Mittermeier eventually left, and now the county is looking for two new executives: one to run the county and another to implement the thin board majority of three’s current commercial airport plan.

Airport proponents have no choice but to acknowledge the depth of community opposition, but have attributed some of the impasse to a lack of professionalism and competence among county planners. While the execution of airport plans may have been bungled, that’s hardly the whole story. It misses the mark completely to suggest that if only the professionals had been more professional, then the process would be further along.

One problem has to do with a lack of candor on the part of county leaders. For the county to go forward with the kind of big international facility that was envisioned, an entirely different and more forthright public discussion would have been necessary as a prelude. That conversation never took place in the seven-year period after the base closing was announced. It would have required acknowledging that real sacrifice would be required for Irvine and surrounding communities to the south, and perhaps, ironically, even parts of pro-El Toro airport Newport Beach. Cities would have been called upon to accept round-the-clock flights, arriving and departing on flight paths where a lot of people would see and hear big airplanes.

Because the skies over Southern California are so crowded already, it also would have been necessary to talk about closing John Wayne Airport. El Toro would have had to be described more candidly as offering both international flights and short- and medium-range service, and also handling the county’s general aviation traffic. The county understood that such a plan never would win community acceptance, so it tried instead to float one that, over time, made aviation experts out of ordinary citizens. Once the public began to get up to speed on runway design and flight operations, the public relations war was lost. The county retreated to a position where it hoped, without acknowledging so, that the Federal Aviation Administration could be pinned with responsibility for insisting on how El Toro would have to operate. Now, at least, Board of Supervisors Chairman Chuck Smith seeks FAA guidance on flight plans, but this may be too little too late.

The county’s breach of public trust on El Toro is already established. It arises from the fact that it never conducted a full and honest discussion on the airport. So if we are going to talk about flawed planning, let’s be clear about how deeply the flaws run. Outright misrepresentation from the top down contributed more to time-wasting than all the alleged incompetence of hired planners, who were only giving the policy people what they wanted.

Additionally, by insulting the intelligence of community leaders and activists, the county further alienated its own constituents. Today, it will be hard-pressed ever to get a credible airport planning process underway anew, even in the unlikely event that it were to propose a more modest and community-friendly airport plan--say, a general aviation facility or second “reliever” airport at El Toro.

The second and more fundamental problem is the matter of who plans for the base, whatever ends up going in there. The county leadership is indulging in fanciful course correction if it now thinks that merely rearranging the name tags at the planning table somehow will produce a more “professional” and “efficient” plan for the base.

We have argued that the process is so badly broken that it needs a complete overhaul to be more representative of community interests and reflective of the spirit of federal guidelines for base reuse. Some of the players have changed since 1994, but the same element on the Board of Supervisors complaining about unprofessional planning is responsible for hijacking the Local Redevelopment Authority and providing no place for other interested parties at the policy table.

In the meantime, the county limps along, addressing important but tangential questions such as what happens next to civilian activities at the base. In this manner, it moves from stopgap measure to stopgap measure, dealing with important parts but essentially still adrift on what to do about the whole.