Supervisors Should Start Fresh

The March 5 election, with its apparent finality to the contentious El Toro airport battle, provides both a challenge and an opportunity for the Board of Supervisors to make a fresh start. The board will be saddled for the remainder of this year with a lame-duck governing 3-2 majority, but it has a rare window now, and again early next year, to alter in a fundamental way its troubled relationship with many county constituencies, and to bring the regional governance of Orange County into the 21st century.

This is a county that for a long time was run as if it were a club where key insiders with influence handpicked political leaders and then told them what they wanted done. Local campaign finance reforms did begin bringing the county into the modern era, while high-tech businesses delivered a middle class with high expectations to the new cities and unincorporated areas of the county.

But the 1994 bankruptcy revealed many lingering defects in how the county still was run, and the long El Toro debate left hard feelings about the quality of county leadership.

Now that the airport part of El Toro reuse appears resolved, attention can be turned elsewhere. Decisions on major public policy matters need to be made differently in the future. They should be arrived at much more openly and inclusively.

The county has many sophisticated groups of citizens and community leaders who ought to have a place at the policy table. Some supervisors have been responsive to these changes, but for too long as a group the board majority has taken too many cues only from special interests.

There must be a higher caliber of leadership and initiative from the board to address the specific regional problems of jails, land use, water quality, housing and transportation.

There also is a new county landscape on which these decisions will play out. The diversity of Orange County’s population in a new century was evident in the recent census, in older cities like Santa Ana and new ones like Irvine.

In the newer suburbs, residents with concerns about quality of life have mobilized and created a new kind of e-mail-based democratic activism centering on the environment and growth. Meanwhile, older neighborhoods have lagged behind in the computer age, threatening to leave the county with its own version of the so-called digital divide.

In the face of change, the county’s political leadership has plodded along. While the county has bickered over El Toro, it necessarily has had to give secondary treatment to important areas of concern, covering the need for low-income housing, better transportation, approaches to redevelopment and environmental challenges.

We know for certain that the old governing coalition that was the hallmark of the late 1990s of Chairwoman Cynthia P. Coad, Chuck Smith and Jim Silva will be broken by the defeat of Coad and the arrival of Fullerton City Councilman Chris Norby. In recent years, this voting bloc has bucked the tide of county sentiment and common sense on the allocation of tobacco settlement money to address county health care needs, and has proved inflexible on substantive modification of the now-defunct El Toro airport plan.

El Toro highlighted the important central question of what kind of place Orange County would be. But as residents and city councils took up these questions in earnest, there was never a corresponding sense that the county’s leadership at the Board of Supervisors level as a group was up to the task of steering the county through the changing times.

The defeat of an El Toro airport and the formation of a new board now make possible a climate in which the county really does have an opportunity to start anew.

The supervisors in the post-Measure W world no doubt are trying to get their bearings. The defeat of the El Toro airport in two consecutive ballot initiatives is a crushing setback for the governing majority. It is now up to them in the remainder of the year to recognize that the electorate has spoken for change.

The reforms in county management practices that took place during the bankruptcy recovery period were significant, but the sense of a new day in Orange County never was possible as long as the civil war over El Toro raged on. The board majority, instead of being chastened by the big disaster of the mid-1990s, allowed El Toro to become a lasting source of contention in the community.

The board now has the opportunity as well as the power to shape the county’s approach to its future. That’s the important big picture to think about now.