IRVINE, CA - May 11, 2001 - Today the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority (ETRPA) filed
    suit against the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), challenging the
    planning group’s recently adopted “2001 Regional Transportation Plan (RTP) Update.” In its
    suit, ETRPA claims that SCAG violated the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) by
    consistently and repeatedly misstating and underreporting the significant adverse
    environmental impacts of the projects described in the plan.

    The SCAG RTP calls for a Southern California regional airport system that would limit LAX
    to 78 million air passengers, limit John Wayne to 8.9 million, and provide a new airport at the
    former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station with 30 million annual passengers. This plan would
    thus have Orange County serve a total of 38.9 million passengers annually, even though it is
    the smallest county in Southern California. It also calls for virtually no air passenger service at
    the regions’ newest airports in the Inland Empire and Los Angeles Counties, where most of
    the significant population growth will occur - March, Norton, Victorville and Palmdale.

    SCAG’s environmental impact report for its plan is deeply flawed. For example, SCAG
    included a 30 million-passenger-per-year airport at El Toro as part of the “No Project
    Alternative” - implying that such an airport currently exists at El Toro. Consequently, in all of
    its analyses it assumed the existence of such an airport as part of the baseline conditions for
    measuring environmental impacts. In reality, no airport or any aviation use exists at El Toro.
    According to ETRPA’s attorney, Richard Jacobs, “SCAG’s fantasy baseline artificially
    minimizes the impacts of the regional transportation plan especially regarding air pollution,
    toxic air contaminants, noise and traffic.”

    ETRPA claims the EIR fails to analyze a reasonable range of alternatives including the highly
    probable alternative of no airport at El Toro, constrained activity at Los Angeles International
    Airport and appropriate service levels in the Inland Empire and Los Angeles counties, where
    most of the region’s growth will occur. These logical alternatives were presented to SCAG but
    ignored in the EIR, even though they would provide a similar total level of service. More
    importantly, these alternatives conform with SCAG’s policy of locating or expanding airports
    consistent with regional growth patterns.

    According to Paul D. Eckles, Executive Director of ETRPA, “This SCAG EIR is being used
    as justification for an irrational expansion of airports and roads leading to them, in highly
    urbanized areas. It underreports the impacts that will be imposed on local communities and
    potentially threatens to waste billions of Federal transportation dollars on projects with no
    more merit than if they were designed on the back of a cocktail napkin.”