El Toro’s Bottom Line

In recent weeks, developments on the county’s controversial aviation front have demonstrated how poor planning decisions can create problems later on. On the face of it, these events appear to be unrelated in the changing regional aviation picture. But there is something fundamental in what they reveal about the El Toro debate. Eight years after the closure of the Marine base was announced, important decisions are being made, battle lines are being drawn and suggested plans to meet the region’s needs all are being floated without the benefit of a clear set of facts about what the county’s aviation obligation really is.

At the heart of this confusion lies a simple truth. The county has never provided a satisfactory answer to what its own real future aviation need is, nor has it determined exactly what its basic contribution to the region should be. After three initiatives and years of turmoil, the county still does not have a bottom line.

The various El Toro airport proposals have shown a county planning apparatus that puts the cart before the horse. The county goal from the beginning was to turn El Toro into a major international airport no matter what. Had the discussion on what to do taken place first, it might have been possible to construct more modest scenarios.

Either a smaller aviation facility at El Toro, working in tandem with John Wayne, or no El Toro airport but lifted passenger and flight caps at John Wayne without facility expansion might have resolved the dilemma. Either approach would necessitate a public conversation about how many millions of passengers Orange County needed to serve. It would be a painful discussion for some on both sides of the airport debate, because there is a hard-core group that wants no airfield at El Toro under any circumstances, and there is a determined Newport Beach constituency for whom El Toro provides the chance to get planes out of the skies over the bay. But if the numbers had been addressed directly before public opinion began to harden, it might have been possible to bring enough people around on one airport scenario or another to build a kind of enabling consensus.

The county planners and their bosses in the thin majority of three on the Board of Supervisors have been no help. Precious time was lost arguing over the huge 38-million-passenger airport idea. It was an inflammatory proposal that died hard. All the while, opposition to the idea of any El Toro commercial airport reached critical mass in surrounding communities.

For John Wayne, the best the county could do was float an expansion alternative to El Toro that was so outsized that it produced its own shock wave in Newport Beach.

Through its failure to serve as an honest broker in the airport debate, the county actually fueled hostility between Newport Beach and communities surrounding El Toro. Instead of producing defensible numbers, it aggravated the debate by manipulating various unrealistic proposals at two airport sites. By the way, it also produced the kind of confusion that brought the nation’s largest airline pilots union again into the debate last week when it made support for El Toro contingent upon different flight plans.

All of this is the important backdrop for understanding the recent rift between the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority and the Newport Beach City Council. When the latter voted to recommend moving cargo flights from John Wayne to El Toro, the former moved to reverse its support of flight and passenger limits at John Wayne Airport, which will expire in 2005. ETRPA, meanwhile, has supplied its own answer to the central question of what the county needs to do. It says the growth is mostly occurring in other counties and that John Wayne has room between its current caps and its physical capacity to accommodate Orange County’s contribution.

The county’s inability to work toward a politically viable solution is also producing consequences in the fallout from the recent Aloha Airlines decision to start flights to Honolulu from John Wayne. The airline’s plan is tied in with an approval of cargo leases for El Toro because room must be found for the Hawaii flights at John Wayne. However, there are two county supervisors who say that they don’t want to sign off on a cargo proposal that also effectively would commit them to what their colleagues want to do at El Toro. Everything is related to everything else in the tangled mess.

Finally, the Southern California Assn. of Governments’ act of assessing various airport scenarios has been a constructive exercise, because it gives the best window on Orange County’s place in the regional mix. But what the county really has needed is realistic numbers. Since it’s never brought the local community through this exercise, any regional proposals remain unconnected to the conflict still being waged in Orange County. Sooner or later, this conversation about county needs and obligations must be conducted as a prelude to any satisfactory resolution of the local battle over airports.