Airport Debate Spreads
One need look no farther than the neighborhoods and cities of Orange County to see how localized the debate over new airports has become in Southern California. Within a radius of several miles, it is possible to find passionate disagreement on the future of John Wayne Airport and the proposed new commercial airport at El Toro. Elsewhere, cities and subregions of the Southern California basin are all making their own assessments of local airports, and often making decisions in isolation about future expansion needs.
The Southern California Assn. of Governments has been the most logical place for needed regional thinking about future airport capacity, and for whatever regional projections there may be. All of this bears both on the local needs of Orange County and this area’s plans to contribute to larger regional needs. However, none of it comes without controversy.
SCAG’s recent regional assessments included a recommendation that an El Toro airport be built to accommodate nearly 30 million passengers a year, and that there be no expansion at John Wayne Airport. These already have fueled the continuing debate in Orange County.
The SCAG findings are an important informational tool and can get people thinking in regional terms, but the basic findings do little to resolve many unanswered questions. Orange County hasn’t had the kind of forthright airport planning process during the entire El Toro debate that would help it sort out an appropriate role in the regional mix. The SCAG findings simply underscore the big unresolved issues for Orange County.
As a practical matter, the regional panel has no power to dictate scenarios, and it operates in its own political sphere. In addition to reflecting the perspectives of widely different communities, it has its own policy objectives. Getting a regional plan makes it possible to wield considerable influence over federal and state spending for various infrastructure projects, such as roads, public transit and cargo routes.
SCAG, however, is not planning the airports in Orange County, and this proposal raises familiar questions about local airfields. First, there are few among the pro-El Toro partisans today, following the bitter initiative wars of the past eight years, who advocate an airport of the size SCAG envisions. Many long since have retreated to supporting a smaller, “community friendly” facility, and indeed, some sentiment along these lines has been expressed within the enabling three-member pro-airport majority of the Board of Supervisors. Why that sentiment has not yet produced any genuine momentum to scrap the big airport currently on the planning table is a mystery of the current state of airport planning. It suggests that airport planners view airport capacity as being in flux according to the politics of the moment; they appear inclined to settle for whatever they think they can get at any particular time, right to the final hour.
Second, the SCAG proposal fails to reconcile the problems that lie at the heart of the flawed El Toro planning process. The first of these has to do with concerns about the safety of runway design. The nation’s largest pilots union recently revisited the El Toro proposal to say that any support was contingent upon the ability to have westerly takeoffs over Irvine.
There’s a big Irvine problem that today is getting little attention. In allowing planning for El Toro to go forward in December 1996, county supervisors specifically banned takeoffs over that city. It is true that supervisors already have discarded one promise made at the same time, that the size of the facility be limited to 25 million passengers annually. But the question of flights over Irvine is so politically problematic that even the swing member of the board, Jim Silva of Huntington Beach, has said that he wouldn’t mind seeing the westerly runway ripped up. So the question remains, how do you operate a big airport as advertised without the pilots on board?
Second, the nation’s airlines have expressed little enthusiasm for a two-airport system, and therefore the question of the future of John Wayne is still in play if El Toro gets built as SCAG wants it. The regional planners aren’t on location taking the heat, but the logic of implementing what they propose could lead to a scenario that is the deepest source of community rancor and mistrust over El Toro. That is, whether all the debate of the past eight years has simply been about moving county commercial air operations from John Wayne to El Toro.
The locals, not SCAG, are going to have to sort this all out. To implement an aviation plan, there must be substantial community support for any new big project. The gap between regional blueprints and public opinion on the ground in Orange County still remains large.