FAA Picks El Toro as Site for Air Marshals

As part of a national push to increase airline security, the closed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station has been selected as the regional headquarters for Southern California-based air marshals, Federal Aviation Administration officials said Friday.

The Transportation Security Administration--formed after Sept. 11--was considering El Toro as a site for a West Coast air marshals’ training academy, but transportation officials said the base has been rejected.

“Whether El Toro is used as a training facility or a regional headquarters for the sky marshals, we’re happy,” said Gary Simon, executive director of the El Toro Local Redevelopment Agency.

“In either event, reusing El Toro to support national security is a wonderful thing,” Simon said. “That’s what closed military bases are good for.”

How the headquarters would affect plans for a park or airport at the site was unclear.

The federal government has been in a hurry-up mode to hire and train hundreds of sky marshals. The number of air marshals patrolling commercial flights had dwindled from a high of 2,000 to 32 at the time of the terrorist attacks.

According to a Dec. 31 memo from the FAA to the Department of the Navy, which owns the base, a three-story building once used as a flight simulator for Marines will be used as an administrative headquarters for the air marshal program.

The FBI may also occupy a portion of the building for administrative purposes.

Simon said the county is working on a long-term lease that would permit the FAA to use the facility at no cost. Details are still being worked out.

“I could see a scenario where a portion of the base remains in the federal government’s hands for national security purposes,” Simon said.

Such a deal, he said, might go on indefinitely and regardless of the ultimate use of the base.

Simon said an air-marshal field office at El Toro would not interfere with the county’s ongoing effort to lease office space at the base, an interim use that helps defray the county’s operating costs there. “The building they are using isn’t something that was in our plans,” Simon said. “First of all, it has no windows.”

The number of air marshals who would use the three-story building is confidential, said Jerry Snyder, an FAA spokesman.

“The air marshals would use El Toro as a field office, where they could work on a computer and do briefings and such,” Snyder said.

The air marshal program has a training site in Atlantic City, N.J.

The Transportation Security Agency, which is taking over the air marshals program from the FAA, would not say why El Toro was scratched as a West Coast training site.

“There are a number of facilities that are equal or better for our needs than El Toro,” a senior official with the agency said.

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Times staff writer Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar contributed to this report.