El Toro Auction May Hit a Snag

Contamination from a hazardous-waste dump on the former El Toro Marine base threatens to complicate the Navy’s plan to auction off a portion of the base for new homes this summer.

The closed 9-acre dump was used for discarded construction material, and in a recent environmental report, released in draft form, the Navy gave the dump site its worst possible rating for contamination. According to the Navy, that means the land in its present condition cannot be sold or leased.

The land is a critical component of Irvine’s plan to redevelop the closed military base because it is one of the few areas that will be sold to developers for homes, office parks and stores. The vast majority of the 4,700-acre base would be set aside for parks, recreational facilities and nature preserves.

The money to pay for the parkland would come, in part, from the millions of dollars in fees paid by those developers.

The Navy still owns the base and has yet to decide whether to clean the dump site and contamination. The landfill is in a 270-acre parcel that also includes 850 homes once used to house military families. Under the city’s current plans, as many as 1,100 new homes would be built on the property.

What to do about the landfill -- officially known as “Anomaly Area 3” -- is the kind of quandary that officials across the country commonly confront as they develop closed military bases. The military cannot sell the property unless it can certify that it is clean. If cleanup is deemed too expensive, the land remains off-limits.

Despite the uncertainty, the Navy intends to sell the bulk of the base at public auction in June after the property is annexed by Irvine. If the auction goes well, the Navy hopes it will become a prototype for base sales across the country.

The timing of the transactions is critical. The Navy wants to sell El Toro, which closed in 1999, to help recoup the cost of relocating troops and cleaning lingering pollution, Navy officials said. Congress also may consider another round of base closures as early as 2005. Nationwide, about 100 of 500 military bases have been closed, including 30 in California.

The tight timetable for disposing of El Toro is “very optimistic,” said Nicole Moutoux, El Toro site manager for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which will determine whether the land is clean enough.

“We’re sensitive to the Navy’s pressure on us that they want to stick to their timeline,” she said from San Francisco. “[But] everyone is assuming there won’t be any monkey wrenches.”

The final analysis of the environmental condition of the base, as well as the land’s suitability for transfer to new owners, will be issued by the Navy on April 28 followed by a 30-day period for public comment. A more thorough report on the dump site also will be given to the EPA.

Potential buyers won’t be thrilled with the presence of a closed landfill in an area slated for homes, and that could affect the bidding, said Richard Gollis with the Concord Group, a real-estate consulting firm that has worked with Irvine.

Assessing environmental risk is “absolutely important to the process,” he said. Developers must determine the “net development opportunity” of a parcel before placing a bid.

Though the base has other pockets of contamination, the area around the dump is the only one slated for development.

Contamination has been a lingering concern at El Toro. It was placed on the Superfund list in 1990 as one of the country’s most polluted sites. The Navy has said about 85% of the base is clean, but that determination was based solely on the military finding no records of hazardous materials used or dumped there.

The Navy had budgeted $300 million for cleanup based on plans to convert the base to a civilian airport. However, the Navy’s preliminary environmental studies didn’t test the soil everywhere on the base, including under the base’s runways.

Additional environmental inspections began after plans for the airport were scuttled in favor of the “Great Park” proposal.

Soil samples taken at the old construction dump showed arsenic, petroleum hydrocarbons, lead and benzopyrene levels that exceeded federal limits for industrial and residential development, Navy tests showed. Buried construction debris included plastic, asbestos and pipes.

Orange County voters last year approved a resolution calling on the Navy to fully clean El Toro before it is turned over. U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein made the same demand in a letter to the secretary of the Navy. Since then, the Navy conducted a second environmental review, including testing soil under the base’s four massive runways.

Under the city’s redevelopment plan, developers buying 3,700 acres from the Navy would be required to deed roughly 80% of the land to the city for parkland, sports fields and open space. In exchange, they will get development rights to build 3,460 homes and 3 million square feet of office and industrial space on 800 acres.

The money to pay for the parkland and other public uses would come from $200 million in developer fees and $153 million in other assessments, bonds and levies.

The auction plan for El Toro divides the base into four parcels. Parcel 2, which includes the dump site and two other closed landfills, is the largest, at 1,678 acres. Homes will go on 270 acres, with 900 acres used for two golf courses, a cemetery and an exposition center. The rest will be deeded for open space.

The only parcel without any known contamination is Parcel 4, which includes 204 acres next to Interstate 5.

The fate of El Toro stalled as Orange County argued for eight years over whether it would become a commercial airport. Irvine’s park alternative, approved by voters last year, “hit us pretty quickly,” the EPA’s Moutoux said, and regulators scrambled to react to the changed plan.

“We’re still grappling with it,” she said.