Like ‘Jaws,’ El Toro Kept O.C.’s Other Issues Out of the Water

Peter Buffa looks at the El Toro debate--the whole wrangling, two-fisted brawl--and sees a movie.

“Jaws,” to be exact.

“When ‘Jaws’ came along . . . it became bigger than just a film,” said Buffa, a political analyst and former Costa Mesa City Council member. “And El Toro has become much bigger than just a political issue.”

In the near-decade since the Pentagon announced that it would close the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, the fate of the 4,700-acre airfield has dominated local politics.

Fueled by the county’s embrace of economic growth as a near-religion, the drive to convert El Toro into an international airport ran smack into suburbanites’ dawning realization that constant growth carries a high price: more freeways, smog and people.

In the ensuing battle, not-in-my-backyard politics led to last week’s fourth public referendum on El Toro, which not only blocked the airport plan but also forced a shift of power in the county’s top political leadership.

And it sent yet another signal that the Orange County defined by suburban complacency and conservative Republican conformity has been supplanted--at least on this issue--by an energized and fractious body politic in which petition-slinging combatants refuse to say die.

That’s not necessarily a good thing, said Norm Grossman, a longtime slow-growth advocate.

“It suggests a failure of long-range thinking,” Grossman said. “This whole thing has locked the county into a yes-or-no mode, and people aren’t willing to break out of this. . . . It’s doubtful that anyone has learned any lessons from it.”

The lengthy wrestling match prompted the Navy last week to announce that it intends to sell part or all of the base, in keeping with the limits of Measure W. Before the Navy reached that juncture, El Toro had hijacked public debate to the point of obsession and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in legal fees, advertising, planning and lobbying.

At the same time, the debate has laid bare a fundamental flaw in the way the county deals with political issues, some experts say.

Under the current structure of supervisors representing districts, the greater good invariably falls victim to the small and parochial, however valid the merits.

“It’s very difficult for the Board of Supervisors to represent the interests of the county as a whole,” said Alan Saltzstein, a Cal State Fullerton political science professor. “Supervisors tend to view the world in terms of their district, and cities in terms of what’s going on in their cities. People have a hard time sitting back and looking at what’s best for the region as a whole.”

Saltzstein believes such a conflict of visions has left a wide range of local issues unaddressed, from the need for increased capacity of mass transit to the growing gap between wages and housing prices.

The El Toro debate “never seemed to get beyond ‘What is it going to do to my city?’ ” Saltzstein said. “It’s an endemic problem to the county. Where do you put the jails? Who pays for cleaning up the beaches? These things are regional problems that you would think the county would feel the need to work together on.”

And it has become a litmus test in local elections, said Sandy Genis, an urban planner and former Costa Mesa mayor.

“You’re running for judge of Fullerton or something, and they ask you, ‘What do you think of El Toro?’ ” Genis said, adding that political careers have been bankrolled or derailed over the issue. “There’s gobs of homeless people, roads are a mess, flood control is underfunded, and we have water quality problems. Hopefully, we’ll talk about something else now.”

Genis recalled a recent community forum in which candidates for district attorney and sheriff were questioned by voters.

“There were people in the audience asking every single D.A. candidate, every single sheriff candidate, ‘What do you think of El Toro?’ ” she said. “I thought, ‘What in the world has El Toro got to do with anything here?’ ”

But candidates who tried to point out that the offices they sought had no connection to El Toro were pressed until they came up with a stance.

“It’s the most combative issue I’ve ever seen in Orange County, and we’ve lived here since 1958,” said Marion Bergeson, a former Republican state senator, assemblywoman and secretary of education.

Bergeson believes some of the passions stirred by the El Toro debate grew from the strength of the local economy.

“When jobs are hard to find and you are trying to put food on the table, people are not as concerned about quality-of-life issues,” she said. “But when things are going well and when the economy is strong, the infrastructure is challenged, major roads and schools are crowded. When they see the effects of clogged freeways and crowded schools, then they become much more militant, much more concerned about the impact of any further development.”

Bergeson said the El Toro debate accented the need for a Board of Supervisors elected at large and for adopting a form of government with a strong central county leader. County residents, she said, have lost “faith and trust” in elected officials.

“I think one of the problems, frankly, is we have lacked strong leadership. It really gets down to a point of being able to have the trust and confidence of people who voted you into office,” she said.

For Robert Lang, the El Toro debate was a watershed moment in Orange County’s development, in both fact and outlook.

“Orange County doesn’t want to be the Sunbelt boom region it once was,” said Lang, director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech and a demographics expert who has written extensively about Orange County. “If it was still aggressively courting all kinds of business, a decision like [Measure W] wouldn’t have been made. The county is still aggressively courting business, but now it is a certain kind of [high-tech] business.”

Almost without notice from the outside, Orange County has undergone an impressive demographic evolution in the past decade, its population growing by a fifth as it changed from predominately white exurbia into a churning, multiethnic economic engine.

More people come into Orange County to work each day than drive out for jobs in Los Angeles or elsewhere. Estimates put the county’s economic output--similar to gross domestic product--on a par with those of Finland, Venezuela and Thailand, and Orange County’s economy would rank about 30th in the world if it were a country.

But Lang believes the county is slowing down what had been a rush to urbanization.

“I think it’s seen its period of enthusiastic growth come to an end,” he said. “The old model was based on bringing quantity of businesses in. Now it is about quality. It’s not like the place is in decline. It is shifting gears to a more mature model of growth, a more selective model of growth.”

And it is doing so self-consciously, said Rick Cole, former executive director of the Southern California Local Government Commission and current city manager of Azusa.

“Orange County is among the older suburbs that are starting to face a very real identity crisis,” Cole said. “Nothing illustrates that more than what to do with the big hole in the middle of it. . . . Everyone is waking up to the fact that what El Toro becomes has a big part in what Orange County becomes.”

He described “an adolescent identity crisis” in which the county must decide what it will be: a sea of endless suburbs with roads carved through the Cleveland National Forest, or a less congested region that might not have the same economic punch.

“All these questions are increasingly urgent,” Cole said. “They have been crystallized in what started as a parochial fight between NIMBYs and pro-business camps on El Toro, and it is now a battle for the soul of the county.”

Marion Pack, a longtime activist on political issues with roots in the 1970s anti-nuclear movement, sees the stirrings of political maturity in the El Toro fight. The debate grew from a South County NIMBY issue into a realization that individuals could unite and achieve broader results, she said.

“When people feel they can make a change at the local level, they begin to make connections with the bigger picture,” she said.

Pack, who was active in several anti-airport efforts, including Measure W, recalled standing outside a North County Costco trying to enlist support for a plan to convert the base into parkland.

“People just said it was already an air base, they flew airplanes out of there, so why not make it an airport?” Pack said. “But then you would take them a little bit below the surface and say, ‘Do you realize what we might be able to do instead of an airport?’ and the lights went on--’I never thought of that.’ ”

In some ways, she said, the battle came down to grass-roots organizing by anti-airport forces against a political and business structure that wants a regional airport.

While Newport Beach residents, who live beneath the John Wayne Airport flight path, overwhelmingly favor a new airport at El Toro, there was little of the broad-based organizing that defined the South County opposition.

Yet in the midst of the El Toro battle, a grass-roots anti-growth movement arose in Newport Beach to slow development--a position in keeping with some of the motives behind the anti-El Toro group.

“They can generate a grass-roots movement, because they did it on that,” Pack said. “Obviously, there wasn’t the passion for it [on El Toro].”

Buffa said the passion hijacked the debate, shifting it from a question of regional public good to a narrower sense of quality of life.

“It became highly emotional, and everything got dragged into that black hole,” he said.

The looming death of an El Toro airport could lay the groundwork for political progress, Buffa said, allowing both sides to move beyond their incendiary differences and forge a common vision.

“I see a great opportunity for people on both sides to stop and take a breath and come to the table; not to hash over what’s happened in the past but to say, ‘What do we do next?’ ” he said. “That’s going to be hard, but in a lot of ways, it’s a huge opportunity.”