Park Not the First Great Idea for El Toro

So they were serious about a great park for Orange County, after all? It wasn’t just a drawn-out charade to make sure nobody built a giant airport on the old El Toro Marine base?

Oh, we of little vision.

I’m told this is a great moment in the county’s history; consider me duly informed.

Two days ago, seven board members of the Great Park Corp. selected a New York landscape architect to design a park that already is being thought of -- at least, by the board -- in grandiose terms. A lone board member dissented for reasons that surely will be lost to history.

I should be jumping up and down, yet I glumly assert that I’m like most Orange County residents: The park is still an abstraction. If a fabulous new experience is on the horizon, who’s talking about it outside the Park Corp.?

Outside that loop, I’ve yet to hear a single Orange County resident in recent years bring up the subject. Shouldn’t a project of such purported wonderfulness generate at least a little buzz?

Here’s my theory as to why that is:

The momentum to build an international airport at El Toro was so strong in the early 1990s that opponents were desperate to find an alternative. Looking at what amounted to a vast lunar landscape in the middle of suburbia, anti-airport forces envisioned a lush green park as the most attractive option. Massive residential or commercial development, for example, wouldn’t have much appeal to a county already sick of congestion.

Behold, a park. Shockingly, surveys showed the public liked parks!

South County residents fervently opposed to an El Toro airport mobilized like fire ants. In a beautiful convergence, the county’s pro-airport contingent was much less vocal. Business leaders pushing the airport just couldn’t rally the troops like the anti-airport people could.

With fervent opposition and tepid support, an international airport was doomed, and it finally expired at the ballot box in early 2002.

My take -- and it’s strictly conjecture -- is that most people in Orange County didn’t much care after that if a park was built or not. Sure, it’d be nice, but defeating the airport was the name of the game.

Instead, a landscape architect named Ken Smith from New York now has a significant part of the county’s future reputation on his drawing board. He will plan the park, now set at roughly 1,300 acres, and says it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

We can all appreciate the challenge.

I am not trying out for Curmudgeon of the Month. I’m simply suggesting the park, in all its hoped-for grandeur, hasn’t captured the public’s fancy. I’d further suggest most of us haven’t paid much attention to the ins and outs of how it will be built or financed, although its supporters insist that’s all been taken care of.

Let’s hope so.

Maybe you’ve heard of Irvine Councilman Larry Agran. If anyone is the godfather of the park, it’s him. He’s the man who’s carried the vision of the park from the late ‘90s onward. He’s also the man who wrote these words in a Times opinion piece in 1993:

“That’s where El Toro comes in. Next to job-rich, high-tech industries, El Toro is the perfect site for developing a National Center for Transportation and Environmental Excellence.”

He also envisioned “transit villages” of clustered housings, shops and public spaces as part of the center. The center should be thought of, he wrote, as “a national laboratory -- a vast public-private partnership where thousands of aerospace scientists and engineers can be put to work learning how to design and build modern rail systems....”

Not a great park in sight back then.

Times change. Visions change.

The vision now is of a huge, spectacular park that will become a landmark and redefine the image of Orange County.

Like you, I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.