Retain the El Toro Option

Despite a slowdown in air travel after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, aviation experts still predict that perhaps 80 million more people a year will be flying into and out of the Los Angeles region within two decades. Something has to give.

Los Angeles International Airport, with its expansion plans mired in controversy, could handle only about one-quarter of that additional load. It is already bearing most of the weight for Southern California and suffers one of the highest rates of near collisions on runways and one of the worst records for late arrivals. Ontario Airport wants new business and easily could expand to serve a quickly growing population around it, but meeting clean air standards poses a tough problem in the Inland Empire.

Southern California can’t afford to foreclose its limited options at other airports in the region. One of them should remain El Toro, the former military base in Orange County.

On the March 5 ballot in Orange County is a proposal that, in effect, would shut the option of building an airport, any airport, at El Toro, instead allocating its 4,700 acres to parks, schools, health care facilities, museums, other cultural uses, open space and sports facilities. Given the alternative of an outsized and poorly planned airport, the park is undeniably attractive. The Times regularly has supported park bond issues on state and local ballots. But we oppose Measure W, although we do so with an understanding of the blunders and missteps that got the county to this point.

Without preserving some kind of airfield potential for El Toro, Orange County would be left to meet its own and its regional obligations under the narrow growth capacity of John Wayne Airport. It’s a facility with a quirky takeoff pattern, a runway problem similar to LAX’s and one 5,700-foot runway to serve a county coming up on 3 million people. Although its current court-approved caps on flights and hours of operation expire in 2005, the airport is really not equipped to carry Orange County’s future need alone.

Opposing Measure W does not mean that we embrace a plan for an airport that could end up larger than Boston’s Logan Airport. Our disappointment in the various designs put forth over the past eight years remains. It is astonishing that county planners never decided to rip up and replace an antiquated runway design, and that they did not draw up flight paths better suited to prevailing winds and the concerns of longtime residents. Pilots say the proposed flight patterns make them nervous about clearing the nearby mountains. And the proposed airport is still too big.

If the airport choice survives next month’s initiative, opponents absolutely should explore every legal alternative to block the current plan in the hopes of a better design.

A routine decision about recycling a closed military base has turned into a nightmarish struggle. A county that grafted affluent new suburbs and gleaming high-tech parks onto a feudal political structure has been torn apart over this plan since 1994.

In decades past, before the multitudes of suburbanites arrived seeking clean air and good schools, regional decisions in Orange County were dictated mostly by a moneyed elite with ready access to compliant county supervisors. When that lingering system, along with agitation from Newport Beach to divert the county’s air traffic away from John Wayne, produced a preposterous early plan to install a 38-million-passenger-a-year international airport at El Toro, it collided with the rising political force of the suburbs. But because supervisorial districts are geographical, a thin majority of three managed to stay beyond the reach of angry voters from Irvine south to San Clemente and from Laguna Beach east into the new communities of Foothill Ranch and Rancho Santa Margarita.

Through ineptitude and arrogance, this majority last year signed off on an environmental impact report that left a host of questions that the Federal Aviation Administration, the nation’s pilots and the airlines are still trying to sort out.

We wish this initiative were offering a choice between a good airport plan and the one that now exists. But we must oppose Measure W because it would zone away a more modest and better designed aviation option for El Toro, at some point in the future, just because politicians bungled the original plan. Orange County does not need Measure W. It does need better leadership.