Airport Foes Prepare to Launch Park Initiative Signature Drive

Opponents of an airport planned at the closed El Toro Marine base are gearing up to begin collecting voter signatures this weekend for an initiative that would replace the airport with a large urban park.

County officials completed a title and summary late Thursday for the proposed measure, which supporters hope to qualify for the March ballot. Signatures must be collected from at least 71,206 registered voters.

Volunteers with Citizens for Safe and Healthy Communities are poised to begin distributing copies of the measure Saturday, with signature gathering continuing through the holiday weekend.

“Assuming there are no glitches, we’ll be ready to go,” committee spokesman Len Kranser said late Thursday. “There’s been a lot of work done to get this set up. Everyone knew what direction to run once we got the word.”

Airport opponents wanted to take advantage of the long weekend to launch the petition drive. They had hoped to have petitions ready at a kickoff rally in Mission Viejo last week, but technical errors in the measure caused a delay in a review by county officials.

Kranser said volunteers would fan across Orange County over the weekend, posting themselves in front of supermarkets, warehouse stores and movie theaters to take advantage of crowds expected to line up for the opening of “Pearl Harbor.”

Supporters are calling their measure the Orange County Central Park and Nature Preserve Initiative. If approved, it would replace voter approval in 1994 of an airport at El Toro with new zoning for parkland, educational and cultural uses, open space and wildlife habitat.

Airport supporters say El Toro is needed as a commercial airfield for the county’s economic future. They contend that developing a park at the 4,700-acre would be too costly and would take decades before it could be fully built. They note that the county’s development plan was amended several years ago to include a park and two golf courses.

Locations where volunteers will be collecting signatures are posted on Kranser’s anti-airport Web site, at https://www.eltoroairport.org.