El Toro Airport Advocates Lost to a United Suburbia

The hundreds of thousands of residents across Orange County who battled a commercial airport at El Toro celebrated a common victory this past week: the triumph of suburbia.

For anti-airport forces, the fate of the former Marine Corps Air Station--the bulk of which is now headed for limited development and a park--was all about quality of life. The airport represented much more than the number of flights per day or decibels per takeoff or pounds of pollutants. It meant surrendering their sanctuary to the urban ills of elsewhere.

In the process, a political base was created and it matured in Orange County’s sleepy southern half, the side where people drove home each night, shut the garage door and breathed a sigh of relief.

The El Toro fight was viewed “as a Scud missile attack on the suburban lifestyle,” said Cheryl Katz, who conducts polling for the Los Angeles Times’ Orange County edition and has surveyed public attitudes on El Toro since 1993, when the base was targeted for closure.

“People were in fear for their way of life and it got them motivated to take action in a very primal, territorial way,” she said. “To the [pro-airport] side, it was more of a planning issue. There wasn’t the perceived threat to one’s way of life.”

As it happened, after eight years of fighting, the triumph by airport foes came so quickly that anyone out of town for a few weeks might have missed it.

In rapid succession, Orange County voters on March 5 rezoned the 4,700-acre Marine base for a park, nature preserve and limited development--discarding airport zoning that was narrowly approved in 1994. County supervisors followed on April 16 by allowing Irvine to take over the property, ending a county-based planning effort that consumed more than $50 million.

Last week, the Navy sealed the deal by announcing that it would sell the property to private owners under Irvine’s development plans.

No one is quite sure what will become of the base, other than it likely won’t be an airport. A proposed initiative to restore airport zoning has until August to qualify for the November ballot; a lawsuit against the March 5 vote has yet to work its way through the courts. The Navy, however, could cripple those efforts by selling the first parts of property this summer.

Argument for Airport Was Purely Monetary

The argument for an airport was always a monetary one: The added dollars, supporters said, would enhance Orange County’s position in the global economy. The plan was to build a terminal that would serve as many as 29 million passengers a year--later downsized to 19 million--and use El Toro’s existing runways. It would be the second-largest airport in Southern California, behind Los Angeles International.

A new local airport was needed, supporters argued, because John Wayne Airport is too small and could never expand enough to accommodate the flying public and tons of cargo now sent by freeway to other airports. Orange County needed to accommodate 30 million airline passengers a year by 2025, airport supporters said--a far cry from John Wayne’s handling of 7 million in 2001.

Most people in Orange County actually agreed with the notion that building the new airfield would improve the economy, said Stan Oftelie, executive director of the Orange County Business Council, which supported an airport at the base. That didn’t sway opponents, who saw it as forever changing the character of the county.

“From an economic development point of view, an El Toro airport still makes good common fiscal sense,” Oftelie said. “But it ignited passions in people who didn’t believe it or didn’t care if it was true. [Fighting the airport] was a way to protect their quality of life, for those who are paying a premium for a lifestyle in Orange County.”

Among the strongest supporters for the new airfield were the three lawmakers who made up a slim majority on the Board of Supervisors. They repeatedly voted to press ahead with the airport, even in the face of weakening public support for the county’s plan.

The tide had progressively turned from the airport’s approval in 1994, when the county was staggering out of the recession and voters were more responsive to the lure of jobs and economic growth.

As the financial picture improved, airport opponents pounded home to voters that the county’s economy was thriving just fine without an international airport. They said the airfield would only worsen Orange County’s imbalance in its jobs-to-housing ratio because airport workers wouldn’t be able to afford to live in South County. And the airport wasn’t needed, they said, because John Wayne and other airports throughout the region could handle Orange County passengers.

At every turn, though, the debate always returned to quality of life: “Many north Orange County residents realize that south Orange County is a ‘nicer’ place and are looking to move down south and would not want to spoil south Orange County with the airport,” said one post last week on an anti-airport Web site message board.

Paul Eckles, executive director of a 10-city coalition of South County cities fighting the airport, was a veteran of such wars as the longtime city manager for Inglewood, next to LAX. Fighting El Toro was a triumph of democracy, he said.

“We know that if you tried to build [an] airport in the middle of the desert, there’d be some hermit that would say it would disturb his tranquillity,” Eckles said. “But what you had here were three members of the board [of supervisors] who could look squarely at the fact that it wasn’t just a hermit opposing an airport but hundreds of thousands of people who felt it was a disaster and would destroy their quality of life.”

It was the urbanization of Orange County that led to the Marines leaving El Toro, he said, and their retreat worked against the idea that the former Marine base was a good place for an airport.

Most people believed that airports should be built away from population centers, he said, not smack in the middle of one.

According to Eckles, some people said no to the airport because they were personally affected; some thought there were better options for the base; and some were just anti-growth. Then there was the school of thought, advanced by a south Orange County pastor, that building an airport “is not a nice thing to do to your neighbors.”

“It’s a matter of weighing the preponderance of benefits,” he said. “People were firmly convinced that the airport would hurt them.”

Others watching the El Toro debate from afar see it as a failure of planning and an illustration of the inherent flaw in abdicating to locals the decisions about building regionally significant facilities. The state never intervened in the El Toro debate--on either side--despite arguments that the placement of new airports is a matter of statewide concern.

“My criticism for California was that they used to be on the cutting edge of planning two decades ago, but they’ve gotten into fighting over jots and tittles instead of looking at the big picture,” said Jeff Soule, policy director for the American Planning Assn. in Washington, D.C. The fact that the two sides spent $100 million “on a family feud at the county level is just insane.”

In Orange County, a long anti-government tradition fueled the flames. The airport was approved by voters by a narrow vote just one month before the county’s finances collapsed in a historic municipal bankruptcy. That vote barred south Orange County’s leaders from any decision-making role about what happened at the base, sparking simmering discontent over the region’s limp political clout.

The backlash against dictatorial government--particularly one that had so bungled its own finances--was the same sentiment that fostered some of the county’s more notorious political associations, said Oftelie, an armchair historian of Orange County.

The Ku Klux Klan got a foothold in Anaheim in the early 1920s, he said, not primarily because of racial hatred but because residents opposed the widening of Zeyn Street. The neighbors didn’t want it because they believed it would permanently change the character of their neighborhood--and the Klan exploited that, Oftelie said.

Likewise, the ultraconservative John Birch Society gained its foothold in the county not because of its anti-globalism views, but because members joined residents fighting to keep sex education classes from being taught at Anaheim Union High School, he said.

“These were issues where government was opposed because they were trying to muck up what people had worked so hard to get,” he said.

It was during the fight for El Toro that another victory over government prevailed, this one in Los Angeles. Residents from El Segundo and Inglewood--the closest cities to LAX--demanded that local leaders there drop a plan advanced by former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan to expand that airport from 67 million passengers a year to 98 million.

The anti-expansion movement won, aided in part by powerful sympathetic state and federal lawmakers and a competitive race to replace Riordan as mayor.

The group became a familiar presence in Orange County, urging supervisors to build El Toro to lessen pressure on LAX.

But to Eckles, “the whole notion being advanced that Orange County needed to have its fair share of grief was bonkers.”

Siting Any Project in Suburbia Is Risky

Putting any major public works project in a suburban area will always be a touchy issue, pollster Katz said, particularly in areas where the populace is educated and able to mobilize. In south Orange County, affluence also came into play; cities spent more than $40 million to hire attorneys and lobbyists to work the system.

They were led by Irvine, a master-planned city that saw the airport as destroying its carefully crafted plan.

“In a sense, the El Toro controversy and the ultimate success of people keeping [the airport] out of their area will serve as a guidebook for other areas facing similar battles,” Katz said. “Orange County is the vanguard.”