No Surrender in Civic War Over Base Site

They are neighbors, but these days, Santa Ana and Tustin are far from neighborly.

Particularly when it comes to deciding the future of the mothballed Tustin Marine Corps Air Facility. And don’t look for the relationship to improve any time soon.

When the Department of the Navy approved Tustin’s reuse plan for the 1,561-acre former helicopter base Feb. 9, it added one more insult to two overcrowded Santa Ana school districts already seething over being denied a 100-acre parcel for a school for nearly a decade.

The approval, which appeared to strengthen Tustin’s authority over what could be built on the site, prompted the districts to sue over the reuse plan on Feb. 22.

The districts’ many allies--including the Orange County Central Labor Council--also say they are considering lawsuits, civil disobedience and other diplomacy-straining steps to back Santa Ana’s eight-year quest for a kindergarten-through-college campus.

The animosity is evident.

Tustin officials “have been very difficult to deal with from the very beginning, and they will continue to be difficult to deal with,” says Martin N. Burton, an attorney for the districts.

“They’ve got some pretty strong personalities.”

Tustin officials, however, say they are being magnanimous by offering Santa Ana Unified School District a gift of 20 acres and $20 million for a school for kindergarten through eighth grade.

“They should take the money and run,” says Christine A. Shingleton, Tustin assistant city manager.

Some say Tustin, buoyed by the Navy’s decision published Friday in the Federal Register, now seems less interested in negotiating with the Santa Ana Unified and Rancho Santiago Community College districts.

Tustin officials, however, say that despite acrimonious demonstrations since the council’s January decision for redeveloping the base, they want to reach a fair agreement.

Both Sides See Cause for Hope From Navy

On the surface, the decision signed by Duncan Holaday, the Navy’s deputy assistant secretary for installations and facilities, appeared to all but green-light Tustin’s $200-million redevelopment plan for the base site.

But the school districts’ attorneys, who allege racial discrimination is behind Tustin’s actions, see a major “silver lining” in wording that encourages both cities to pursue a settlement and acknowledges the role of the U.S. Department of Education--an agency that historically has supported the heavily Latino Santa Ana schools--in the land use process.

At the heart of the nearly decade-long struggle is this: Santa Ana Unified School District, long plagued by overcrowded schools and few suitable sites to build new ones, wants a unique campus students could attend from kindergarten through two years of community college on the southwest portion of the base within Santa Ana city limits.

In response to the district’s woes, the U.S. Department of Education in 1994 told the Navy it endorsed the idea of turning over nearly 100 acres for the school.

Once the city of Tustin won authority as the Local Redevelopment Agency for the base, that plan was rejected for one favoring South County schools. Tustin’s plans have always called for a dominant commercial presence on the land.

The uses would include mostly middle-income to luxury housing, a 200-acre golf course, an industrial park, retail property, a hotel, a homeless shelter and law enforcement training facilities. It also includes plans for schools for Tustin, Irvine and the South Orange County Community College District.

Both cities have long seen the base site as part of their destiny. Beginning in the 1960s, Santa Ana and Tustin each fought to annex the then-Santa Ana Naval Air Station.

“There was always the intrinsic promise that something would happen there and that Santa Ana would benefit as a city,” said Gordon Bricken, mayor of Santa Ana during the late 1970s and early ‘80s.

Santa Ana leaders thought then, much as they now feel about that 100 acres, that by annexing the base they could help relieve some of the urban problems the fast-growing city was facing.

Bricken says he takes no position in the current battle, but he thinks that race plays a role in Tustin’s refusal to let a Santa Ana high school be built on the base.

“There’s always been this feeling that if Santa Ana somehow got more property, the wrong kind of people would come into an area,” Bricken said. “The underlying issue is the perception that Santa Ana does not enhance the image of the area. . . . And a lot of this was because of the city’s racial makeup.”

Tustin probably wants to make the redeveloped real estate “as expensive as possible,” and figures having a Santa Ana high school wouldn’t help, Bricken said.

Tustin Rankles at Hints of Racial Bias

Don Saltarelli, a former county supervisor and Tustin mayor instrumental in that city’s successful annexation of the base, scoffs at the notion that racial bias is behind Tustin’s actions over the years.

“The base was always part of a long-term plan to have more housing, more businesses, more parks, more recreational facilities” in Tustin, Saltarelli said. “It was a battle royal between Tustin and Santa Ana. But we got it.”

Back then, Tustin had a tax base of only about $600,000, Saltarelli said, far below the current $18 million. Annexing the military installation was an obvious way to enhance its tax base. It also would check urban growth in neighboring cities like Santa Ana.

“We were a small city adversely affected by everybody’s growth, and we couldn’t do anything about it,” Saltarelli said. “We moved to protect our interest.”

Three decades later, Tustin still sees the base as necessary to its economic vitality, while Santa Ana school districts see it as a partial solution for having some of the most crowded schools in California.

Santa Ana Unified has 26,000 children in portable classrooms--more than Tustin has in its entire school district. Fifty of the city’s 56 schools are over capacity. Santa Ana school officials point out that the portion of the base they seek is within the school district’s boundaries.

But Tustin officials argue that because any housing constructed on the base would be in Tustin and Irvine--not Santa Ana--any schools built should serve those districts. Tustin officials also argue that too much public property--as opposed to commercial businesses--would severely reduce the amount of moneymaking ventures to pay for the redevelopment.

The disputed land also happens to be the environmentally cleanest, which means businesses would be able to open quickly, Tustin officials say.

“It’s our most valuable land. Take it out, and the project doesn’t work,” Mayor Tracy Wills Worley said.

Santa Ana Unified officials argue that jobs created by the redevelopment plan will add about 5,000 children to its schools. Tustin officials say it will add, at most, 500 children to Santa Ana schools, which is why the city offered 20 acres and $20 million.

Santa Ana school officials, activists and legislative and labor allies, however, say that Tustin, like much of South County, has plenty of space--unlike Santa Ana, which is 98% built out.

“If they can’t build in one place, they can build somewhere else,” said Ruben Smith, a lawyer for Santa Ana Unified. “We’re talking about neighbors here. Most of the jobs brought in for the project are not going to be high-paying jobs. . . . Those workers are going to [live in] places like Santa Ana.”

Santa Ana Unified Supt. Al Mijares believes Tustin offered the land and money to persuade that city to build anywhere but the base.

“They brought up the money issue as a way, I think, to buy us off. We don’t want the money. We want the land that’s coming to us,” Mijares said. “I just think they view our community as an urban center with demographic challenges they would rather not have on the base.”

Education Department’s Authority May Be Key

Barring a settlement, the looming question appears to be: Does the U.S. Department of Education have any authority over who gets property on the base? For eight years, Santa Ana’s claims have been fueled by the federal agency’s apparent approval.

As late as March of last year, Tustin officials asked the department to rescind its 1994 approvals. They were refused.

In one letter to the Navy, a Department of Education official accused Tustin of “provinciality” in its refusal to give the school districts the 80 or so acres they now seek.

Each side took heart in the final publication of the Navy’s decision to transfer the base to Tustin.

Santa Ana school officials say the Navy, in encouraging both cities to pursue a settlement, acknowledged the role of the federal education agency in the land use process.

The passage reads: “Continuing discussion among the federal, state and local governmental entities responsible for . . . transfer of surplus federal property . . . for educational use, such as the U.S. Department of Education, is the appropriate process of resolving this issue.”

Said Edmond M. Connor, a Santa Ana schools attorney: “This is the signal we’ve been waiting for. . . . New horizons have opened and we might actually be able to plead our case to an entity who makes decisions on education based on need and not expediency.”

Yet Tustin officials also saw reason for optimism in the decision.

“It’s safe to say the Navy rejected any allegations our reuse plan for the base was racially discriminatory. . ,” Tustin City Manager William A. Huston said. “They could have said, ‘We’re going to take this part out and also this part.’ But they took our entire reuse plan for this base and approved it.”

So far, federal education officials have been relatively silent.

“Obviously, we’re going to be reviewing the Navy’s announcement,” said Jim Bradshaw, a Department of Education spokesman in Washington. “If the Navy decides some of the land on the base will be used for educational purposes, we come into the picture and screen the applicants.”

In the past, City Manager Huston has contended that the “Department of Education has gone beyond [its] authority.” On Friday, he moderated his stance on its role in the dispute.

“They’re a player, no question about it,” Huston said. “But our feeling is that the Department of Education would rather the parties settle our problems so we don’t have the Navy or the Department of Education making local land use decisions.”

Settlement Would Need Give From Both Sides

Since Jan. 16, the day the Tustin City Council voted to go ahead with its redevelopment plan, there have been broken confidentiality agreements, officials barred by police from public meetings, charges of racial profiling, legislative salvos and an act of civil disobedience during the Tustin council’s Feb. 5 meeting that nearly resulted in the arrests of protesters.

The school districts filed suit Feb. 22, charging that Tustin’s reuse plan would further burden Santa Ana’s crowded schools. School officials have said they may file federal and state lawsuits alleging racial bias.

Tustin Mayor Worley called those accusations “offensive.” And Huston repeated Friday that a discrimination suit would be a “deal breaker.”

In Sacramento, meanwhile, the state Legislature soon may vote on a bill by Assemblyman Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) to force Tustin to cede more land to Santa Ana.

When a similar bill with strong support died in a filibuster last September, state Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) delivered a tearful reproach on the Senate floor to those who, he said, had turned their backs on Santa Ana’s children.

Huston has his own stories of unpleasantness.

The morning after the late-night Tustin council meeting on the reuse plan, the city manager said he approached a young labor leader he recognized as a protester.

“I said ‘Hi,’ and told him that I saw the placards and the signs and that I recognized his right to protest, but asked that he not be disruptive,” Huston said. “He basically told me where to stuff it.”

Confidential negotiations are continuing, say both sides. But each interprets them differently.

“We feel the city has gone as far as we can go,” Huston said.

Since the Navy’s approval of Tustin’s reuse plan, schools’ attorney Connor said city officials have been lukewarm to a settlement.

“We noticed that their feet started getting hardened in the cement,” he said, a position he believes doesn’t square with the written decision.

“It should give them pause for concern,” he said. “It’s not over till it’s over.”