Airport Foes’ Success May Hinge on Past

Supporters of an Orange County slow-growth measure thought they had a winner in February 1988 when a whopping 73% of county voters in a Times Poll backed their proposal to link future development to adequate roads, parks and sewers.

Four months later, the measure died at the polls with an anemic 44% of the vote after developers spent $2 million to defeat it.

The initiative was one in a string of failed attempts at the ballot box by various interest groups to change the way Orange County government operates. Now the foes of the proposed airport at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, twice burned themselves at the polls, will try once again to appeal to their neighbors countywide.

Their success may depend as much on the lessons learned from past initiatives as on the issue itself.

Among those lessons, initiative experts say:

* Simplicity is best. Craft an initiative that is straightforward and easy to understand.

* Money talks. Prepare to spend at least $500,000 to get your message across--and to spend double that against an organized opposition.

* Don’t be overconfident. Votes snowball from “yea” to “nay” with the barest whiff of concern that a measure won’t do what it claims it will.

The latest proposed initiative, advanced last week by South County airport foes, is aimed for the March 2000 ballot. It would require a two-thirds countywide vote for the construction or expansion of so-called “noxious uses,” including airports, jails and landfills.

Initiative drafters say they expect to have what they call the Safe and Healthy Communities Act ready in two weeks for final approval by a coalition of South County cities opposed to El Toro. The Irvine City Council will hear a presentation on the new measure on Feb. 9.

Their strategy calls for a “one-two” punch to kill the county’s airport plans. Regardless of whether the first initiative wins voter approval, a second measure is aimed for November 2000 to repeal a 1994 countywide initiative, Measure A, that changed the base’s zoning for an airport. An attempt to repeal that vote in 1996 was defeated.

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While most anti-airport activists are coming on board to support the new strategy, some don’t, calling the “noxious uses” measure bad public policy and politically disastrous.

That squabbling violates another axiom of initiative experts: Unity is a prerequisite for winning.

Irvine Mayor Christina L. Shea wants to put only the non-aviation plan before voters, as anti-airport leaders had discussed publicly for more than a year. She voted last week to allow coalition attorneys to draft language for the Safe and Healthy Communities Act but said she can’t yet support it.

“Politically, it’s suicide to have a two-pronged approach,” she said. “This is our third time [before voters], and we have to be successful. This is a big, big risk, and we haven’t talked enough among ourselves to determine how big a risk before we move forward.”

Backing Shea’s concerns is UC Irvine professor Mark Baldassare, founding director of the university’s Orange County Annual Survey.

“This is a very expensive and time-consuming process that at some point is going to make voters feel impatient and frustrated,” said Baldassare, who also conducts opinion polls for The Times Orange County edition. “And when people are cranky about an initiative, they’ll go out and vote against it just because of that.”

But undoing the 1994 vote in a single step “can’t be done, as a practical matter, both legally as well as politically,” said Irvine Councilman Larry Agran, a leader of the anti-airport fight. That’s why the new strategy was proposed.

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“All over the county, people don’t like the idea of an unwanted [project] being foisted on their communities,” he said.

Most people liked the idea behind the slow-growth measure in 1988, which was backed by many of the same forces opposed to building an El Toro airport. The idea then was to slow down the gradual paving of Orange County to a more manageable rate of growth and to keep greedy politicians and developers from ruining the county’s quality of life.

But $2 million dollars later, those concepts were battered by an aggressive opposition insisting that the measure would do nothing to improve traffic, which had been a foundation for the popularity of slower growth. The campaign accused the measure of being bad for the economy and a way for South County elitists to cloister their privileged communities.

“It went down in flames because an expensive campaign was run that was successful at convincing voters that, while the initiative had some good ideas, it also had some fatal flaws,” Baldassare said.

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The same weaknesses are evident in the proposed Safe and Healthy Communities Act, and would be hammered by a well-financed opposition, he said.

South County airport foes should expect to have a $3-million campaign launched against them, said Frank Wilson, a Laguna Hills consultant who ran the anti-airport campaign for the 1994 initiative.

“The pro-airport forces will spend any amount of money to kill this, and they’ll have help from across the state,” said Wilson, who also has worked for the other side, running a campaign on behalf of developers against a 1988 Riverside County slow-growth measure.

One measure that was successful before Orange County voters was 1990’s Measure M, which increased the sales tax by a half-cent for transportation projects. It passed on its third try after voters rejected similar measures in 1984 with 70% opposed and in 1989 with 53% opposed.

The lesson from the final success of Measure M: Shared pain helps motivate voters. In that case, it was gnarled traffic throughout the county with seemingly no end in sight that finally nudged the measure toward success.

But those days are gone, Baldassare said.

“Traffic and growth and environmental issues have nowhere near the power they did 10 years ago,” he said.

Wilson, who isn’t currently involved in either side of the airport issue, said the ongoing argument over developing El Toro stems from Measure A, the 1994 zoning initiative for the airport.

“What Measure A has done is what we predicted it would--create lots of contention and a schism in the community that the community doesn’t need,” he said.