On the Wrong Runway

In the aftermath of last week’s overwhelming rejection of the county leadership on El Toro base reuse, there are big post-Measure F questions about Board of Supervisors Chairman Charles V. Smith, and colleagues Jim Silva and Cynthia Coad, who make up the pro-airport majority.

The extension in January of Smith’s tenure as board chairman now obviously was a terrible group decision, and an embarrassment in view of the stated purpose of keeping the El Toro airport express train on course. That train has now been involved in quite an election day wreck.

The supervisors have sought to have it two ways as custodians of the El Toro base reuse process. They claimed that cities surrounding El Toro were represented adequately on the now-discredited Local Redevelopment Authority, which is made up of only the board. Then when the board’s own protocol called for the ascendancy to board chairman of Tom Wilson, one of two members representing South County, the board majority passed him over because he wasn’t pushing the airport.

Here is what “representation” has come to mean, according to the current majority. You get to have a supervisor who is supposed to make only a show of representing hundreds of thousands of interested citizens.

For the second consecutive time, Wilson was denied his rightful turn as chairman. If the board majority grasped its credibility problem with voters countywide, it might see it’s paying dearly for allowing the airport proposal to dominate everything. For self-interest if nothing else, the board could use a South County chairman now to lend support to getting El Toro planning back on track.

The only thing worse than being in serious political trouble is to not recognize it. Smith and the rest of his majority apparently have convinced themselves that Measure F doesn’t mean anything. Wilson could have been crucial to negotiating a completely new approach to base reuse. Instead, he is relegated to philosophizing that what has happened to him is not personal, just politics.

If the majority had a provision available allowing midyear transfer of the chairmanship, it could gracefully pass the gavel to Wilson now. But the board and the public are stuck at least until the end of the year with what they have. The county will plod on with its newly reelected representative from the first supervisorial district, the lame-duck board chairman Smith.

It will be a formidable task for this board to find a way to reach out to its minority and to a larger disenfranchised community of voters. Like Smith, Silva and Coad can’t be counted on to be much help.

On election night, Silva was as clueless as Smith. He talked about how much money the anti-airport forces raised, and of the inevitability of victory for the airport plan for the long run. As a swing vote on the board, he could have used his powers to demand a different runway configuration. He never did. Now the pilots have weighed in with a devastating critique of the county’s plan.

Coad is relatively new to the process, but her recent pronouncements about smaller is better never translated into any meaningful use of her decisive vote.

This board majority has misread previous elections, and it has miscalculated what kind of airport might be acceptable. Supervisors lost a chance to rein in the size of the airport when they broke a promise made in December 1996. There was a window between 1994 and the release of the environmental impact report last December when it might have been conceivable to propose an airport that South County and Irvine could live with. It’s possible that opportunity now may be lost permanently. In the meantime, the citizen-driven nonaviation plan has been refined, is getting attention and is a credible alternative.

Supervisors have missed the big picture too. It’s the transformation in the county. For years, residents flocked to the suburbs to live in new cul-de-sacs while power brokers like Smith and company made decisions backstage. Today, they are rejecting county paternalism in favor of being included as informed citizens in a democracy. The sooner the board gives way to a more representative Local Redevelopment Authority on El Toro, the better.