El Toro Fading for Travel Planners

A regional aviation group will begin studying how to move Orange County passengers and cargo to inland airports as it becomes increasingly unlikely an airfield will be built at the former El Toro Marine base.

The Southern California Regional Airport Authority is the first agency outside Orange County to acknowledge that a commercial airport at El Toro may not be built. Orange County supervisors voted last month to allow Irvine to annex the property for residential, commercial and parkland development after voters overturned airport zoning in March. The Navy is preparing to sell the property.

Authority members representing three of the group’s four counties stopped short, however, of declaring El Toro dead. They said a lawsuit over the vote rezoning the base could prevail and revive airport planning efforts.

Another regional transportation agency, the Southern California Assn. of Governments, has refused to remove El Toro from its forecast for airport service in the next 20 years. Officials from cities in Los Angeles County successfully argued that such a move should wait until legal actions were exhausted.

Still, the authority asked Executive Director Peggy Ducey to begin talking to airports and cities in Riverside and San Bernardino counties about the impact of handling more Orange County passengers and cargo. Orange County once planned that El Toro would handle about 19 million of Southern California’s 158 million airline passengers by 2025. Those passengers will have to be accommodated elsewhere.

What happens in coming months will determine whether the authority can carve a niche in the debate over regional air travel. The group, which has been meeting for more than a year, has focused on promoting El Toro as an alternative to expanding LAX, whose growth has been capped.Last month, the authority hoped to go through the Legislature to establish a role for itself as a watchdog of counties’ compliance with regional transportation plans. But the bill by State Rep. George Nakano (D-Torrance) was rewritten two weeks ago with the Southern California Assn. of Governments, not the authority, in the watchdog role. The bill, which also sought to punish counties by withholding federal funds, was changed to give priority in transportation funding to counties complying with regional plans.

Ducey suggested the authority focus on how passengers and cargo would get to airports in the Inland Empire. High-speed and conventional rail might play a role.

The Southern California Assn. of Governments forecasts that without El Toro, as many as 30 million Orange County passengers a year would have to use other airports, Ducey said.

Meg Waters of the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority opposes any role for the authority in transportation planning and called SCAG’s demand forecasts “laughable.”

There hasn’t been a city of Los Angeles representative at authority meetings since Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla resigned from the authority in November. Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, an El Toro supporter, missed last week’s meeting. Riverside County Supervisor James Venable has complained that neither Orange County nor Los Angeles County has paid its $50,000 annual dues for the five-seat board.