El Toro ain’t over till it is

JOSEPH N. BELL

The arrival in my mailbox last week of a new hit piece, complete with

scare headlines (“Hostile Takeover,” “Secret Memo” etc.) offered up

by our friends in Irvine who conceived a mythical park so we could

expand John Wayne Airport, tells me two things.

First, while our city officials gave up on an airport at El Toro

many months ago and a growing number of locals have followed their

lead, the Irvine high command is plenty worried that it could still

happen.

And second, the marketing weaponry of the enemy -- as it did in

the campaign for Measure W -- makes our efforts look like a Little

League team up against the Yankees.

Consistent with their conviction that the best defense is a good

offense, Irvine’s expensive four-color, eight-page mailing piece asks

us to lend our names to an open letter to Los Angeles Mayor James

Hahn -- to be run as a full-page advertisement -- warning the mayor

to bug off from his efforts to turn El Toro into a commercial airport

run by an agency of the city of Los Angeles. I find the concern that

prompts this advertisement heart warming, even though it is being

given little attention locally.

Newport Beach Mayor Steve Bromberg tells me that he made three

phone calls to his counterpart in Los Angeles, none of which were

returned.

“They haven’t suggested we participate,” he said, “and the impact

on Newport Beach of the lengthy plan they’ve submitted isn’t clear,

so we haven’t weighed in.”

But some other locals have -- and are. Much of the current effort

of the Airport Working Group, says its president, Tom Naughton, is

involved in legal challenges. The group has filed lawsuits against

the Navy Department, which still owns the El Toro facility, and the

city of Irvine, over its environmental report on El Toro. The group

is also strongly supporting the Los Angeles plan to run El Toro, and

is closely watching the efforts in San Diego to resolve a similar

problem by working with a regional airport authority.

As group director George Margolin put it, “There’s still hope as

long as the El Toro runways are there and immovable structures aren’t

built on the airport site.”

Meanwhile, the New Millennium Group -- which is promoting the

“reasonable and realistic” runway V-plan designed by engineer Charles

Griffen -- is urging local citizens to press their representatives to

initiate action in Congress to provide the Federal Aviation

Administration authority to operate an airport at El Toro. (Only Rep.

Dana Rohrabacher is likely to be listening, since Rep. Chris Cox has

diligently undermined an El Toro airport from the beginning.)

The New Millennium needs funds to keep its Web site

(https://www.ocxeltoro.com) going, an increasingly difficult problem

since, as vice-president Ann Watt says, “Everybody keeps reading in

the newspaper that the El Toro airport is a dead issue.”

The most scholarly effort has come from two Newport Beach women

who are trying by creative research and sheer diligence to keep the

El Toro airport vision front-and-center in the consciousness of their

Newport-Mesa neighbors. Shirley Conger (an Airport Working Group

board member) and Nancy Alston decided some months ago that if the

true nature and extent of John Wayne activities could be made public,

it would strengthen the will of local citizens to renew the fight for

El Toro.

Here are some of the more critical points offered in their study,

truncated and rearranged to meet space limitations:

* Almost 1,000 planes of all types fly in and out of John Wayne

each day, with about 280 flights involving commercial jets. Under the

settlement agreement, the noisiest flights are limited to 85, while

the others mostly come under an exempt category because they produce

a decibel level below 86.

* Under the 2003 settlement agreement, the 8 million commercial

passengers presently flying in and out of John Wayne can increase to

10.3 million by 2011 and 10.8 million by 2015. To put that in

perspective, the passenger total increased by 7.7% between March 2002

and March 2003 despite the drastic downturn in nationwide air travel

during that period.

* The only limitation on the total number of commercial flights

out of John Wayne is the total allowable number of passengers

carried. Because there is an increasing trend to smaller commercial

commuter planes that carry a much lighter passenger load, the likely

result will be an increase in the number of flights out of John Wayne

within the same total passenger limits.

* Private and corporate planes are not limited by the passenger

count or curfew. They can take off or land anytime, day or night, as

long as they don’t violate the noise parameters.

The report itself is in Q&A; form and offers much more detail. It

concludes:

“With the growth in Orange County’s economy, there will be

increasing pressure for John Wayne Airport to expand before the

Settlement Agreement’s term limit of 2015. The original Settlement

Agreement ran until 2005, but the revised Agreement was promoted in

2002, well before the expiration date. We can predict the same

pressures will arise again.”

Shirley Conger says, “Newport Beach is not an activist community.

If it would wake up, we could really do something. Grass-roots effort

can bring about change. That’s why we want to keep El Toro alive.”

The report isn’t dressed in four colors, and it has no racy

headlines or phony park pictures, but if you would like a copy, you

can send a self-addressed envelope to Shirley Conger, P.O. Box 111,

Corona del Mar, CA 92625, and she’ll send you the latest version

absolutely free of charge.

The above is little more than a brief overview of El Toro airport

proponents as Irvine goes once more on the attack. It offers a rather

painfully familiar story: several disparate groups of determined and

dedicated local citizens who are pulling in generally parallel but

critically diverse directions, lacking the money, the single focus,

and -- most important of all -- the common leadership that has

characterized the enemies of an airport at El Toro since they lost

the first two elections.

Can it be turned around yet again? We can only ponder the words of

that eminent philosopher, Yogi Berra, who said: “The game ain’t over

till it’s over.”

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.