Engineering Consent

A few million dollars here and a few million there, and the war for the hearts and minds of Orange County citizens on both sides of the El Toro airport debate has turned out to be a very expensive proposition. It is incredible that after eight years of civil war all this money has been spent, with more in the pipeline, without any reliable sense that the proposed airport is likely to operate as advertised.

The lifting of Measure F’s restriction on airport spending has been a factor in unleashing a new round of authorized expenditures for public relations and lobbying on the pro-airport side. On the anti-airport side, an established pattern of spending to defeat the proposal simply has been affirmed by the same court ruling, which struck down the March 2000 ballot initiative. The decision on the anti-airport initiative by a Los Angeles judge renewed the perception in communities surrounding the base that money spent to defeat the El Toro airport was a good public investment in protecting the area’s quality of life.

For county airport planners, even before the short period of Measure F’s restrictions, the availability of airport revenues from John Wayne Airport to finance the planning and public relations work for El Toro long was a way to soften criticism. There was no direct diversion of funds from other county purposes to finance a project lacking a firm base of public support. Having John Wayne revenue available has been a powerful incentive for designing a two-airport plan--the plan might have looked completely different were it not for the need to use these John Wayne aviation funds at El Toro.

Since 1995, the county has spent nearly $35 million in this manner to plan a new airport. A few holes turned up recently in the argument that the spending was painless, however, when the director of John Wayne said that the continued use of funds for El Toro could result in new fees to passengers and other clients at the airport.

This warning came at about the same time that the county said it would be spending another $5 million over the next 15 months on a public information campaign to promote the county’s plan. The funding is to be handled by the Orange County Regional Airport Authority, a 13-city coalition. This authorization was justified as a way to counter the millions being spent on the other side. Indeed, the money being spent by South County cities to fight the airport war has dwarfed county spending on promotion, especially recently.

For the South County cities, money to defeat El Toro and funding authorized in Irvine last spring to promote a “great park” at the former Marine base have been seen as a way to turn the tide and then begin making the case for an alternative. Irvine’s recent assumption of the lead role in a proposed ballot initiative for next year to repeal plans for an El Toro airport effectively would render moot some of the money already spent by the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority. In addition to campaigning against an El Toro airport, that eight-city coalition, which includes Irvine, has promoted the so-called Millennium Plan, a park with commercial development and new homes.

Last month, Newport Beach joined the fray with its own allocation of $3.69 million to promote the approval of an El Toro airport, arguing that John Wayne has done its share.

With all these millions being spent, the problem still lies with getting a realistic and forthright airport proposal. One could argue that money to promote an airport plan, or at least debate its merits, would be well spent if the plan didn’t have the nation’s pilots concerned on safety grounds and the airlines opposed to operating out of two airports.

Instead of addressing these concerns directly, the county has complained that such opposition serves only to pressure the county to change its proposed airport operations. Well, isn’t that the point of having the experts weigh in: to give them some influence on the final project?

At the same time, the county argues that it needs to spend more money to get “the facts” about its airport proposal out. What it is saying really is that legitimate questions about safety and economic feasibility raised by the experts are counterproductive.

A believable plan could be a basis for discussion. The effort to silence important aviation voices suggests only that the plan itself is not the product it’s cracked up to be. It does no good to spend millions on correcting “misinformation” if the facts are in doubt.

No wonder both the South County cities and Newport Beach, each with completely different stakes in the outcome of the El Toro fight, are making it municipal priority to argue their own case. But it’s costing them big money.