Many Airport Foes Rate O.C. Board Low

Nearly 40% of people opposed to an El Toro airport are clearly unhappy with the county’s Board of Supervisors and have little confidence in it, according to a Cal State Fullerton poll released Wednesday.

The poll shows that the airport debate may be driving confidence ratings down in Orange County compared with responses on similar questions for boards of supervisors elsewhere in the state.

The two surveys, one of statewide residents and the other of county residents, is the second part of a quarterly survey by the Orange County Business Council and the Center for Public Policy at Cal State Fullerton.

Statewide, 30.5% of people said they had either a “great deal” of or “quite some” confidence in their board of supervisors, compared with only 21% among Orange County respondents.

Of those against the airport, 39.6% said they had either very little or no confidence in the five-member board.

“Basically the airport is making a difference here,” said Phillip Gianos, professor of political science at Cal State Fullerton. “And, in this case, the supervisors become a convenient, natural target.”

The poll did not differentiate between the board’s three pro-airport majority supervisors and their two anti-airport colleagues.

The results of the survey, based on responses from 550 Orange County residents and 604 people statewide, varied little from previous polls. Margin of error for the survey is about 4.5%.

Level of Confidence in Board Is ‘Surprising’

Julie Puentes, an executive vice president for public affairs at the business council, said that despite the negative opinion of the board by many anti-airport residents, she noted that 60% of survey respondents replied that they had from “some” to a “great deal” of confidence in those same county supervisors.

“I think that there is a surprising amount of confidence given that the supervisors have taken a beating for the last couple of years on the airport issue,” Puentes said.

County and elected officials said the results were interesting because no matter what people’s opinion of the proposed airport is, they had confidence in the board.

Board Chairwoman Cynthia P. Coad praised anti-airport supervisors Todd Spitzer and Tom Wilson for working hard and “listening to their constituents.”

“I think all five of us are pretty darn hard-working,” she said.

But Coad faulted the survey for polling relatively few people, raising questions about the legitimacy of the poll’s findings, at least on statewide data, she said.

In addition, 77.6% of county respondents said the county is on the right track, versus only 67.8% of the respondents asked about the state’s direction. By contrast, 32% of the statewide respondents believed the state was on the wrong track compared with only 22% of those who responded about Orange County.

County residents also have more confidence in local public services--such as police, fire and libraries--than statewide respondents, by a margin of 89.2% to 83%.

Puentes and the university’s political scientists tend to believe that people living in the county “for the most part” realize that “it’s a pretty great place to live,” she said.