Trouble Landing El Toro

In recent weeks, the Board of Supervisors has inched toward a better approach to the El Toro base reuse dilemma. By the end of last week, the board had regrouped by approving a new office to handle the proposed airport project, and shaken loose authority from County Executive Officer Jan Mittermeier.

Unfortunately, the most important question will not be answered satisfactorily for some time. That is, will this be a cosmetic realignment, with many of the same old conclusions reached, or will there be a candid reassessment?

For the two anti-airport board members, Todd Spitzer and Tom Wilson, who voted in effect to make Mittermeier the problem, there could be some risk down the road. They need a base reuse plan that can win acceptance from their communities. Now they are signed on to a line of argument advanced by Board Chairman Charles V. Smith and Supervisor Jim Silva that all this somehow can be done better if only the board has more direct control over the outcome.

That route has pitfalls. Throughout the debate over Measure F, the ballot initiative that requires approval of two-thirds of voters for an airport, we have pointed to more fundamental problems with the approach to base reuse. Unless the process is reconfigured to reflect the composition of the affected communities, whatever plans are developed by the new El Toro department will not be anchored in a base of political support where it’s most needed.

With overwhelming opposition to an airport plan in communities surrounding the base, and no direct representation on the Local Redevelopment Authority (that is, the Board of Supervisors), any plan presented by a new office is going to start out facing substantial community skepticism. The new UC Irvine survey finding further erosion of support for an airport at El Toro suggests what a challenge it will be to come up with any new credible aviation plan.

Still, there is some movement on the larger question of base reuse, even if this is measured in inches, not miles. At the beginning of the current year, the board’s pro-airport majority of three was determined to shoehorn a huge 29-million passenger international facility into the middle of a mature suburban area that had made plain its opposition. By this month, the board was talking about taking a longer look, and most important, seriously considering a nonaviation use.

Others, even in the pro-airport camp, seem to want to take more time. For example, the Orange County Business Council, long a champion of the commercial airport, has weighed in with its preference that the county not go to the ballot box again until it gets a proposal right.

Exactly what voters would decide the next time they go to the polls is all important. But if the county moves forward in good faith, its planning process will recognize the importance also of trying to heal the rift with southern communities. For too long this process has been walled off by the Hall of Administration’s misreading of the mandate of a 1994 ballot measure that rezoned the base for possible airport use. County officials have become increasingly alienated from the cities surrounding the base.

So while the county now takes single steps in a new direction, it is also worth raising a few notes of caution and calling for realistic expectations. First, in asking the staff to consider alternatives the board will be revisiting some past airport choices. County leaders in the past have not given due consideration to the merits of those options. So will anything change here for Smith, Silva and Cynthia P. Coad now that they have been jarred by the passage of Measure F? It is important to remember that the shattered credibility of the airport planning process arose in part from a sense that options never really were open in the first place.

The staff proposals of yore already have floated and dismissed ideas that may have had merit, such as a plan that would have moved general aviation to El Toro, and left John Wayne Airport as the county’s main airport. That proposal several years ago barely got any discussion, but recently it received a boost from former FAA official Donald Segner, who has based his analysis on safety problems at John Wayne Airport and on those envisioned for El Toro.

It is unfortunate that, after years misspent on false starts, it now will take much longer to move the process forward. At least the journey is beginning.