Judge’s Ruling Another Setback for Great Park

An Orange County judge declared Tuesday that supporters of a plan to build a large urban park instead of an international airport must start from scratch collecting voter signatures to put an initiative on the March ballot.

It is the fourth time since May that supporters of the park at the former El Toro Marine base will be forced to restart their signature drive, raising serious doubts about whether they have enough time to collect the required 71,206 valid signatures to meet a Sept. 18 deadline.

But initiative supporters vowed Tuesday to appeal the decision. They said they’ll continue collecting signatures with the current wording.

The timing of the election is critical for airport foes. The Department of the Navy is scheduled to approve the county’s airport plans next June and opponents want the park plan approved by voters before then. In his ruling Tuesday, Judge James Gray barred initiative proponents from using the 50,000 signatures they say they have collected. He said the ballot title and summary for the Orange County Central Park and Nature Preserve Initiative was “affirmatively misleading.”

The judge ordered a new title and summary to be written to replace the one prepared by County Counsel Laurence M. Watson’s office. Gray suggested the parties meet with Watson’s office to agree on final wording.

“We’re going to keep going,” initiative spokesman Leonard Kranser of Dana Point said. “We feel quite confident the appeals court will not stop this effort.”

Pro-airport attorney Fredric D. Woocher said airport foes will ignore the judge’s order at their own peril. He said Gray was “quite firm” that new wording was necessary to lawfully describe the measure and that the current signatures are invalid.

“What this reaction suggests is that they know they can’t regroup in time for March,” Woocher said. “This is really a harbinger of things to come, and that is that their initiative is flawed.”

The initiative would replace airport zoning, approved by voters in 1994, with designations for parkland and a nature preserve. A specific plan for the base, called the Great Park, was developed by Irvine city leaders and is supported by a coalition of Orange County cities.

Supporters of the initiative have previously been forced to restart their signature campaign three times, most recently having to dump an estimated 30,000 signatures after it was determined that a map was missing from documents sent to the county.

Woocher represents Citizens for Jobs and the Economy, which sued the county in June over the ballot title and summary. Attorney Barbara Lichman, representing the Airport Working Group of Orange County, argued during an airport debate last month that the measure includes language that could allow whoever develops the land to build on much of the site.

A portion of the initiative states: “Areas identified [as] open space are not necessarily committed to permanent open space uses. Certain property within the open space category is committed, through public or private ownership, to remain as open space, but other property, due to market pressures to serve a growing county population, may ultimately be developed in other ways.”

Supervisor Chuck Smith, a strong airport supporter, said that despite the favorable court ruling, he was not going to gloat.

“I’ve seen enough of these things come back and if [anti-airport forces] have enough money--and they do--they can come back,” Smith said. “But it’s just another pebble strewn along El Toro’s rocky way.”

Supervisor Todd Spitzer, an airport opponent, called the judge’s ruling a “serious setback” given the amount of time left to gather signatures.

With 50,000 signatures already collected, Spitzer said, it is the responsibility of the county counsel’s office to clear up the initiative’s title and summary through an agreement among the parties. Watson should urge the Board of Supervisors to put the measure on the ballot, Spitzer suggested.

“County counsel has to implore the board that they have an obligation to put this on the ballot themselves,” Spitzer said.

The board has been split on El Toro’s fate for years, favoring the airport by a 3-2 vote.

Initiative supporters suffered other setbacks earlier in the signature gathering process. They first held off launching the effort to fix technical problems, then a set of documents submitted contained typographical and other errors. When a second set of documents was submitted, the map wasn’t included, registrar officials said.

State law requires a ballot title and summary to be drafted by county attorneys and to be included on each petition circulated for signatures.