It’s Fourth and Long for Airport at El Toro

Is this any way to convert a Marine base?

No, but when it comes to El Toro, this is what Orange County is stuck with.

Conflicting information. Lack of consensus. Multiple countywide votes over a decade. Elected supervisors then working against the outcome of those votes. Los Angeles officials now trying an end run or a Hail Mary (select your favorite football metaphor) to get its way. Enough intellectual dishonesty all around to fill several radio talk shows.

If this is democracy in action, where can we rent a benevolent dictatorship for El Toro? Why didn’t the Marines just tell us what they wanted done with the base and make it an order?

At the moment, we’re in the throes of a belated effort from L.A. officials, aided and abetted by a bloc in Orange County, to persuade the federal government to resurrect plans for an international airport at El Toro. Last week, I talked to the two Orange County congressmen who I thought would know the most about the issue, but even they differed on what the sequence of events needed to be.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, whose constituency favors an airport, conceded the latest effort is a longshot but not impossible. He says there’s plenty of sentiment both within the Navy and the Department of Transportation to use the abandoned base for an airport. His counterpart, Rep. Christopher Cox, said in no uncertain terms that plans are proceeding to auction parts of the base and that an airport is off the table.

Maybe it’s because he’s got the worse hand, but Rohrabacher offered the more stimulating remarks as he considered his bid. He says he thinks Orange County voters, if asked to go to the polls a fifth time, would support an airport.

“The core of this is: What do the people of Orange County really want?” Rohrabacher asked. “They voted for it twice, they voted against it twice.” He says the last vote, the “Great Park” initiative of March 2002, should be discounted because people didn’t realize on election day that large sections of the base would be auctioned off to developers. The Navy didn’t announce those plans until later.

Rohrabacher may be wrong about how another election would turn out, but he’s right about voters not knowing everything they know now.

The outcome in 2002 represented, in the main, the will of South County voters. They felt the most threatened by an international airport and voted overwhelmingly in favor of the park plan. By contrast, 62% of North County residents voted against the park initiative but didn’t turn out to vote with the same relish as their South County brethren. To muddle things further, polls in North County had shown over the years that its support for an airport had ebbed significantly.

So, what does Orange County want for El Toro? If there were such a thing as a unified Orange County, we could probably answer that.

Because there isn’t, we’re left to conclude that opposition to an airport is so great that it’s almost certain one never will be built here. When the Marines operated the base, neighbors supported the need for flights in the area, but local officials should have realized that wouldn’t necessarily translate to support for commercial flights.

In other words, supporting America is not the same as supporting American Airlines.

So instead of a clear-eyed plan, what we got at the ballot box over the last 10 years were initiatives just fuzzy enough to make the losing side think it had a chance to overturn the results.

The anti-airport side says it’s not worried about the latest gestures. There’s probably no reason to be, but if any of them are football fans, they surely know that Hail Marys have been known to connect -- usually for touchdowns.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at

The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.