The OC Weekly El Toro Watch The OC Weekly El Toro Watch
OC Weekly, and principally writer Anthony Pignataro, has been producing a series of "El Toro Watch" articles, since January of 1997, covering a wide range of issues related to El Toro reuse. Through the cooperation of the paper, the El Toro Airport Info Site will carry future pieces of the series and archive back articles. The OC Weekly website is found at http://www.ocweekly.com
The articles are published electronically here as a public service. Statements made by the authors do not necessarily reflect the views of the El Toro Airport Info Site Team.
Bleccccccccccch!
A people’s environmental impact report on El Toro International Airport
by Anthony Pignataro
Sept. 14, 2001
Except for a few golfing diehards who don’t mind a flat, featureless course; some local horse and Winnebago owners; and the occasional sheriff’s deputy, nobody visits the abandoned El Toro Marine Corps Air Station anymore. And it really shows. The once-vibrant base is overgrown with head-high, prickly weeds. Most buildings are locked tight, their asbestos-lined walls slowly crumbling into the soil.
For the past four and a half years, county officials and outside consultants have been compiling the main El Toro Environmental Impact Report (EIR) and the vaunted Airport System Master Plan (ASMP) to explain what the county wants to do with this rapidly decaying base. Stacked, the reports and studies of the draft EIR top six feet.
But even a cursory read by the mildly curious reveals that the reports are plagued with inaccuracies, contradictions and ample evidence that the county’s planned El Toro International Airport will be a monumental nightmare that—once built—will never go away.
The reports describe an international airport handling 28.8 million passengers per year, two million tons of cargo per year, and 300,574 flights per year—which pencils out to 823.5 flights per day, all day, every day. Roughly speaking, the county wants to build an airport the size of San Francisco International, the nation’s fifth-largest. And county officials say they can do it all for $3 billion.
On Sept. 17, the county Board of Supervisors will vote 3-2 to approve the EIR and ASMP, signaling to the federal government that Orange County is ready to begin building the airport. The approving supervisors—Cynthia Coad, Chuck Smith and Jim Silva—will say El Toro will be a clean, neighborly airport. They will say county officials have done a wonderful job. They will say the airport will usher in a new golden age for the county.
They are wrong. El Toro will require a monumental construction job to convert it into a commercial airport. And once completed, the airport’s design, surrounding terrain and weather will present considerable problems for the pilots who have to use it. The county’s own noise consultants say overflying aircraft will drown thousands of homes in "sleep-disturbing" noise. Toxic emissions from the airport will, according to the county’s contradictory and incomplete air-quality analyses, cause cancer in thousands of people who work in and live near El Toro. Most incredible of all, the county can’t conceive of a reliable way to ship fuel to its monster airport.
What’s needed is a People’s Environmental Impact Report. So here it is.
TERRAIN
1. Mountain barriers. The place where the county wants to build its massive international airport is a nightmare for pilots. "The air station is screened on three sides by mountain barriers," states the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the federal agency in charge of weather forecasting. There’s 1,500-foot Loma Ridge to the north and more 1,000-foot ridges to the east. Saddleback Mountain, at more than 5,000 feet tall, lies a couple of miles to the northeast. The Laguna Hills lie four miles to the south.
2. Tailwinds. First, the physics: all pilots prefer taking off into the wind to ensure maximum airflow over their plane’s wing surfaces, thus increasing lift. The worst situation: taking off with the wind—a condition called tailwinds. Now for the meteorology: NOAA and Marine Corps historical weather data show the wind at El Toro blows east eight months out of the year, averaging about six knots and often reaching 10. The county’s plan calls for nearly 70 percent of all aircraft to depart to the east, with these tailwinds. To surrounding mountains and tailwinds, add . . .
3. Runway gradient. The base the Marines formally abandoned on July 2, 1999, was largely a World War II relic. Constructed in the early 1940s, when all aircraft had reciprocating engines and propellers that allowed for slow takeoff and landing speeds and distances, the surrounding terrain and weather meant little. Navy construction crews poured concrete into two runways pointing north-south and two heading east-west, crossing in the middle like a giant plus sign. Never properly graded, the base’s southern and western edges are between 60 feet and 120 feet lower than the northern and eastern edges. That slope creates a 1.55 percent gradient on the east-west runways. And that will force aircraft to climb the equivalent of a 10-story building. It also violates Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) runway requirements.
4. Encroaching urban development. The hillsides surrounding El Toro are increasingly home to semiluxurious housing developments. "Land in the immediate vicinity of the station is cleared and cultivated and under extensive urbanization," states NOAA. Coto de Caza, Lake Forest and Mission Viejo are nothing but homes. The Irvine Co.’s massive Spectrum technology and entertainment complex lines the base’s southern perimeter; beyond that, thousands of retirees live in Laguna Woods. In the Santiago Hills of east Orange just north of the base, the Irvine Co. is planning a massive 7,000-acre residential and commercial development.
"Urban encroachment is why the Marines closed El Toro in the first place," said Marine Lieutenant Colonel Tom O’Malley (retired), a consultant to the South County cities allied against the airport, during the Aug. 15 county El Toro forum in Lake Forest. A consultant who participated in the 1992-1993 Department of the Navy negotiations to close El Toro and who requested anonymity confirmed O’Malley’s assessment to the Weekly.
SAFETY
5. Political runways. The county says it will tear up the current runways (because they’re not dense enough to handle the pounding of modern commercial air traffic) but will reconstruct them in exactly the same way the Marines did more than 50 years ago—an archaic plus-sign layout with runways spaced less than 1,000 feet apart. The FAA would prefer to see all the runways run parallel—for reasons of safety as well as efficiency. But never mind airline safety: parallel runways are politically dangerous. Run them north-south, and you pound North County cities with noise; run them east-west, and you have planes flying over wealthy Newport Beach. And we can’t have that. Hence the plus sign.
6. No simultaneous operations. Because the county insists on reusing the Marines’ plus-sign layout, it’ll be impossible for airport-traffic control to conduct simultaneous landings or takeoffs on either set of parallel runways. To do that, the runways would have to be at least 3,000 feet apart. That restriction will slow operations considerably.
7. Eastern departures. Making matters worse is the fact that the county wants nearly 70 percent of all aircraft to take off to the east on Runways 8L and 8R. That means they will have to take off uphill into rapidly rising terrain with a nearly constant tailwind—the worst combination of factors affecting any of El Toro’s runways. And it shows in the county’s own aircraft-performance analyses. Published in mid-1998 by the aviation firm Jeppesen Sanderson, which draws up all the airport charts that fill every pilot’s flight bag, the analyses show that all aircraft departing on Runways 8L and 8R will suffer a nearly 10-ton "weight penalty." That means they will only be able to take off if they’re carrying 20,000 pounds less of fuel, passengers or cargo than their maximum takeoff weight. Interestingly, the analyses also show that none of the other runways at El Toro—which point toward population centers south, north and west—will inflict similar weight penalties on aircraft.
8. Steep climbs. On top of that, the county wants all departing aircraft from every runway to begin an immediate climb at a rate of 420 feet per nautical mile just to avoid the surrounding hills and ridges. While the county has been quick to point out that such a climb is well within the flight capabilities of all of today’s commercial airliners, this climb differs sharply from the 1,000-foot-per-nautical-mile climb carried out by aircraft leaving John Wayne Airport. That climb, while much steeper, is an artificial noise-mitigation measure; should the aircraft find itself unable to continue climbing, it can safely drop to a much lower altitude. But at El Toro, the planes either make the climb or they hit the ground.
9. Engine-out procedures. So here’s a plane, loaded with fuel, passengers and baggage, hurtling down the runway at maximum power when, suddenly, an engine goes. Now the pilot is at two-thirds or even half power—and quickly running out of asphalt. Can the plane stop before it slams into the hill at the end of El Toro’s Runway 8? Or should the pilot muscle the plane into takeoff and try to set it down again somewhere? Difficult questions—made worse by the fact that the pilot has perhaps one second to decide.
The situation is rare—a pilot may fly for 30 years and never encounter it—but it happens enough that every pilot must consider the possibility before every takeoff. As a result, every airport has special engine-out procedures. Because of El Toro’s surrounding hills, the Jeppesen-developed special procedures require a stricken aircraft departing to the east to make a 15-degree banked climbing turn 100 degrees to the right. Pilots launching damaged planes to the north would have to make a similar climbing turn but would have to crank the aircraft 130 degrees to the left.
These procedures are difficult enough for aircraft flying at maximum power, and they allow absolutely no margin for error. They also exemplify the extent to which county officials are willing to go to cram an airport into El Toro.
A TURNKEY OPERATION
One of the earliest gems of pro-airport propaganda came from Marine Brigadier General Art Bloomer (retired), currently executive director of the North County cities supporting the county’s airport proposal. "Converting El Toro to an operational civilian airport is essentially a turnkey operation," Bloomer wrote in a 1993 LA Times editorial. That assurance reappeared countless times in pro-airport mailers. To voters who had no idea what the county’s plan would entail, the statement made an airport at El Toro seem sensible and cheap.
10. Demolition. The ASMP makes it clear the county’s plan is neither sensible nor cheap. Just about everything the Marines ever built at El Toro has to go: the air-traffic control tower, hangars, Quonset huts, buildings, streets and fuel tanks. All four runways are goners, too, with new concrete laid for each of the two north-south and two east-west runways in phases over the next 20 years. El Toro boss Gary Simon has called it "the largest demolition project in Orange County history."
11. Earth moving. This will be followed by the biggest earthmoving job in county history. The goal is to flatten the runway gradients, currently running between 0.62 percent for the north-south runways and 1.55 percent for the east-west runways. In 1998, the county’s Facility Requirements technical report came out, saying engineers would have to cut 4.4 million cubic yards of dirt from the base’s northeastern and southeastern quadrants and fill 10.3 million cubic yards of dirt in the northwestern and southwestern quadrants.
But a year later, the Grading Calculations table buried in the El Toro Financial Analysis technical report indicated a far larger—and more expensive—operation. According to the new calculations, engineers would have to cut more than 23 million cubic yards of dirt—enough to form five Hoover Dams—and fill a similar amount over the course of 20 years. The technical report estimates such a project would cost more than $145 million—a figure that, like all the county’s financial estimates, seems low.
12. Re-grading. No matter the scale of El Toro’s future earthmoving projects, the runways will still have gradients of between 0.52 percent and 0.91 percent. Runways 35R and 35L, which head north-south, won’t change much, but east-west runways 8L and 8R will look radically different.
It’s hard to tell from the ASMP which end of those runways will look worse. After the grading operation, the western end of runways 8L and 8R will rise more than 60 feet, taking on the characteristics of a tabletop. Drivers on the perimeter road that wraps around the western edge of the base were once able to see straight down the runway; if the county gets its way, those drivers will be looking at a 60-foot wall of dirt.
The opposite will occur at the eastern end of the runways. There, lowering runways 8L and 8R will create a sharply sloping hill at the end of the pavement. For now, the base perimeter road is dead even with the runways; in the future, it will eventually be 40 feet over it.
13. Out of gas. Aircraft engines need kerosene, and it’s by no means certain that fuel will ever get to the county’s airport. County El Toro spokesman Marine Lieutenant Colonel Tom Wall (retired), who has a tendency to minimize the impacts of the proposed airport, frequently tells people that fueling El Toro will be no problem: the county will use a couple of nearby fuel pipelines to get the precious—and highly combustible—kerosene to the proposed tank farm on the base’s southern edge.
But the county’s spokesman doesn’t know his ass from a 40-mile-long hole in the ground. The pipelines are, by the county’s own measure, useless to El Toro International. The eight-inch line once used by the Marines, which runs from the Defense Fuel Depot in Norwalk, was fine for a base handling a couple of hundred flight operations per month. But it’s much too old and thin to supply an airport doing that every day. A second 16-inch line is already spoken for: it pumps fuel to Camp Pendleton.
14. Petroleum parade. So never mind the county’s high-profile spokesperson. How will the county really fuel El Toro International? Trucks. The El Toro EIR proposes that the future airport’s fuel will come from hundreds of tanker trucks rolling in and out of the airport 24 hours per day.
"The Proposed Project assumes facilities configuration and activity reflecting tanker truck delivery, which is the method of fuel delivery to John Wayne Airport," which is how the dry ASMP puts it.
For comparison’s sake, note that 23 fuel trucks arrive daily at John Wayne—every one of them after 11 p.m. But the plan for El Toro calls for an average of 244 trucks—each carrying 8,000 gallons of kerosene—to arrive daily at the airport. Since the county estimates it will take one hour to connect, unload and then disconnect each truck, it will have to move 10 trucks into the tank farm every hour of every day of every year.
SHOWDOWN
A solid 60 percent of the county opposes the proposed airport, but county officials are hell-bent on building it anyhow. They want to start demolishing buildings next December; they want the first airliner to land sometime in 2005.
In an attempt to blunt the opposition, pro-airport supervisors said two weeks ago they wanted to limit El Toro to just 18.8 million annual passengers (MAP). This is clearly a public-relations ploy, and it’s not even a new one: Coad first floated the idea of keeping El Toro at 18.8 MAP way back in October 1999.
In any case, airports expand. This is a fact the residents who live near LAX and John Wayne know only too well.
Pro-airport Supervisor Chuck Smith understands this, too, which is why he told federal government officials during a Nov. 29, 2000, meeting at the White House, "We never planned to have a 38 MAP airport right off." Instead, Smith outlined for FAA, Navy and White House officials an airport that "will be developed in phases. Other boards will make future decisions whether or not to build larger airports based on demand."
What the airlines want is another story entirely. Few have expressed any interest in El Toro. Asking them to maintain their John Wayne operations and then set up shop seven miles down the road as well is too much.
TRAFFIC
Whatever gets built at El Toro will boost highway traffic. The county’s own propaganda states the proposed airport will increase OC traffic by a massive 176,123 average daily trips. The county tries to offset this huge increase with two not-so-subtle tricks.
The first is that whatever traffic the airport causes will pale before that inflicted by anything other than an airport. County propaganda projects that "a non-aviation use" will produce a staggering 339,000 average daily trips.
The county is, of course, referring to the South County’s old "Millennium Plan," a mixed proposal of commercial, residential, education and park uses. That plan has since been abandoned in favor of the vaguer "Great Park." And if the Great Park has even half as much parkland as its authors promise, it will yield far fewer daily trips than the 339,000 projected by the county for the Millennium Plan.
At the same time, county propaganda makes the incredible claim that traffic will get worse no matter what gets built—or even if nothing gets built—at El Toro. "There will be 761,910 fewer vehicle miles traveled than under a scenario in which an airport is not built," states a county flier on traffic.
The county’s logic here is quite simple, if wrong: since so many county residents in the future are destined to be driving to an airport, it’s better that they make short trips to El Toro than longer trips to LAX, Ontario or wherever. Thus, to keep traffic manageable, the county has no choice but to build a big airport at El Toro.
The problem with this spin is that the massive demand for an airport the county says it’s trying to meet simply doesn’t exist. A few months ago, the Southern California Association of Governments admitted it had overestimated the number of Orange County residents using local airports by 4 million—the right number was just 12 million, not 16 million, every year. Subtract from that number the approximately 5 million who use an airport other than John Wayne Airport, and you come up with an accurate county-airport-demand number of 7 million. And, indeed, in the past five years, demand at John Wayne has stayed pretty much stagnant, hovering around 7.5 million passengers per year.
If all that weren’t enough, county El Toro spokesman Tom Wall recently told South County residents that El Toro International Airport isn’t about their traveling needs. Instead, Wall said, El Toro International was really driven by the desire to attract global tourists.
THE C-WORD
County promotional materials talk about the airport’s impact on air quality in vague, contradictory ways. One single-sheet flier titled “Frequently Asked Questions—Air Quality” mentions that El Toro will “potentially increase air pollution to the region” as well as “improve air quality.” It bets on future cleaner-burning aircraft engines but adds the caveat that “the county’s environmental analysis does not take into account this new technology.”
The concern about air quality masks a darker anxiety about cancer. But even after reading the county’s December 1999 EIR and the April 2001 misleadingly titled “Supplemental Air Quality Analysis” (it actually revises, not supplements, the original EIR), it’s impossible to nail down a reliable estimate of how many people will die of cancer because of the giant airport.
Identifying cancer risk shouldn’t be terribly difficult. But in the case of El Toro, no one knows what the elevated cancer risk is because the county’s tables and calculations make no sense.
“The information provided in the EIRs is not sufficient to understand or verify,” said Judy B. Yorke, a licensed environmental engineer who has been running her own San Juan Capistrano-based engineering firm for the past six years. “There’s no way to know what the true health impact will be.”
Yorke pored through the county’s air-quality reports and tables on June 14, 2001. In comments she submitted to the county, she said she was astonished to find that county consultants had used an obsolete computer-modeling program that dated to 1993—still allowed by state law but long since abandoned by private industry. Into that obsolete model, Yorke soon discovered, county officials had fed information they didn’t disclose in the EIR. Yorke was in the position of an algebra student whose test includes a faulty formula and no variables.
“Without those inputs, we can’t verify what the county put into the computer model in the first place,” said Yorke, who added that including these inputs is common—even mandatory —for firms fulfilling private contracts.
Despite those problems, Yorke identified a significant flaw in the county’s research. If the county is correct, the impossible will occur sometime in the next few years: as El Toro International produces more pollution, the health risks to humans will fall.
For instance, the Supplemental Analysis lists 29 toxic compounds that both El Toro and John Wayne will emit. At build-out in 2020, El Toro considerably exceeds John Wayne in emitting 22 of these compounds, including such scary toxics as benzene, formaldehyde and diesel PM-10. But the Supplemental Analysis table titled “Worst-Plausible Excess Lifetime Cancer Risk” doesn’t match those numbers.
Easily the most important table in the entire EIR, this is supposed to explain how many people will get cancer because they’re exposed to emissions from El Toro. As you read the following, keep in mind that the South Coast Air Quality Management District considers a risk of 10 in 1 million excessive.
Under current conditions, according to the Supplemental EIR, the risk of getting cancer from working at John Wayne right now is 7,686 in 1 million, but only 134 in 1 million at El Toro. That’s fair enough at the moment, since nothing is happening at El Toro while John Wayne serves 7.5 million passengers per year.
But when El Toro is finished in 2020 and John Wayne is handling considerably fewer flights, the on-site cancer risk for John Wayne climbs to 8,003 in 1 million while the risk associated with El Toro climbs to a relatively paltry 317 in 1 million. This brings a total cancer risk for both airports to 8,320 in 1 million.
Data for health risks at residential and occupational sites is similarly inscrutable. And this isn’t even taking into account the fact that the tables in the county’s original December 1999 EIR bore no resemblance whatsoever to the Supplemental Analysis. For example, the original EIR said the on-site El Toro cancer risk in 2020 would be 150 in 1 million—far smaller than the Supplemental figure. The existing on-site cancer risk for John Wayne was even more striking: just 230 in 1 million compared with the Supplemental Analysis figure of 7,686 in 1 million. And no reason was given for the disparity in the figures.
“Health risk is a huge issue,” said Yorke. “But you get the sense that what’s here can’t be right.”
NOISE
For a long time, county officials insisted that noise from this massive airport would not bother the tens of thousands of South County residents who live near the base. These days, they’re not even pretending to believe that fiction. Materials put out by the county’s outside public-relations firm Amies Communication say “regular night operations” will make “significant” noise.
But county officials still insist no homes are close enough to the base to warrant soundproofing. Are they right?
Only if you accept the county’s meaningless way of defining and measuring noise with reference to what academics call the Community Noise Equivalent Level (CNEL). The CNEL analysis is a meaningless academic number that doesn’t tell people a thing about how much noise they’ll hear in their homes. It is the average of noise a person would hear over a 24-hour period. As such, it’s powerfully misleading: take the 11-second, high-pitch, 90-decibel (dB), scream of a 747 flying over your house at 1:08 a.m., average that out over the 3.5 minutes of near silence on either side of that, and you emerge with a flatter noise pattern.
Even the county’s own noise consultants understand this is crap. “CNEL is an inadequate descriptor of sleep disturbance,” wrote chief county noise consultant Vince Mestre in a June 21, 1999, memo to then-El Toro program head Courtney Wiercioch.
But never mind the experts: county officials continue to use the CNEL measure because it helps them skirt a state law that would require them to soundproof any home exposed to an average daily noise level of 65 dB. And as the EIR and Amies Communication brochures make perfectly clear, “there would be no residential structures inside a commercial airport 65 CNEL line.”
The June 21 Mestre memo is an astonishingly frank description of just how bad El Toro will be for the thousands of residents who live around the base. It ends forever the myth that residents who have lived next to an airport for many years will face nothing new when El Toro becomes operational. It is so revealing that the county went to extraordinary efforts to keep it under wraps.
For over a year, the county insisted it was exempt from public disclosure. The reason: “attorney-client privilege,” a completely bogus rationalization achieved when someone crossed out the name Wiercioch—the individual Mestre normally reported to—at the top of the memo and wrote next to it “Mike Gatzke.” Gatzke was then the county’s outside counsel. The tactic failed to hold up on appeal, and the memo finally fell into airport opponents’ hands on Aug. 3, 2000.
It’s the fact that El Toro will be a round-the-clock airport with large numbers of night flights that will make the noise so bad. According to Mestre’s once-secret memo, the Single Event Noise Level (SENEL) metric —which measures the actual noise produced by a single event, like a plane flying over your house—“is a better indicator of sleep disturbance [than CNEL].” Mestre added that SENEL levels of just 70 dB would be enough to wake up as much as 7 percent of the surrounding population.
Houses with the windows closed will screen out 20 dB, but a house with the windows open will screen out only 12 dB. Because of the local climate, Mestre recommended in the memo that the county should assume residents would keep their windows open at night and draw up an 82 dB SENEL contour to show true sleep-disturbance impacts.
“The mild climate of the area and the lack of historical military night operations may indicate widespread use of open windows at night,” wrote Mestre. “Closing windows may not be an option in these areas, since they are not required by the county to have been constructed with mechanical ventilation.”
All MD-80s, DC-10s, 727s and 747s produce at least 82 dB in flight. Mestre pulled no punches about what this would mean for county propaganda. Using this new contour, Mestre warned, “would impact homes that have been exempt from the county noise standards and may have not been constructed with sound-control treatments.”
Such a “sound-print” would, according to Mestre’s memo, suggest nearly 5,000 homes hit by at least 82 dB of noise. But there was worse news, Mestre warned: “The above analysis does not consider departures [to the south], which have SENEL contours significantly larger than those of Runway 34 arrivals.”
Mestre then pointed out that the number of homes under the southbound departure corridor affected by at least 82 dB “will be a very, very large number.”
Mestre buried his most devastating prediction beneath layers of negatives and dependent clauses: “Under no circumstances will the noise study conclude that there is no significant noise impact for a 28 MAP airport with 22 percent of the operations at night.” Translation: jet noise from El Toro will be loud enough to wake people up. That will be true, Mestre added, even if the county does what it says it won’t do and soundproofs homes around the new airport. Even then, Mestre wrote, “these night operations will still be a significant impact.”
In conclusion, Mestre wrote that his firm, Mestre Greve Associates (MGA), “will represent in its noise study that night operations at El Toro are a significant impact.” And just to make sure there was no mistaking his sincerity, Mestre ended his memo with the statement “The above findings are supported by the entire staff at MGA.”
None of Mestre’s recommendations made it into the EIR. Because county officials determined that no one lives in the 65 dB CNEL zone, the county will spend no money soundproofing homes.
50 Reasons to Hate the Proposed El Toro International Airport
by Anthony Pignataro
1 If SoCal really needs a big, new airport, old March Air Force Base in Riverside County, now open for commercial flights and 25 air miles from El Toro, sports a 13,300-foot runway—the longest in California.
2 On Nov. 20, 1997, county executive officer Jan Mittermeier told the solidly pro-airport Orange County Business Council that "96 percent of Orange County cargo is transported through airports other than [John Wayne Airport], which, according to Chapman University president and economist James Doti, is the equivalent of $4.9 billion in lost annual revenue." That sounds great, except Doti denies he or anyone at Chapman ever came up with that figure. In fact, no one seems to know where Mittermeier found such a precise figure. Unless she made it up.
3 At 1:44 a.m. on June 25, 1965, a U.S. Air Force C-135 (the equivalent of a Boeing 707) crashed into Loma Ridge nine minutes after departing north on El Toro’s Runway 34. Aboard were the plane’s 12 crew members and 72 Marines headed for Vietnam. All were killed. After the crash, all big transport aircraft were directed to depart El Toro to the south on Runway 16. Today, the county wants 38 percent of all departures to head north on Runway 34.
4 The county wants El Toro’s eastern-facing Runway 7 to launch 62 percent of all departures. This is despite the fact that Runway 7 is the worst of all of El Toro’s runways, since it forces aircraft to depart uphill into rising terrain with tail winds—a hat trick of trouble commercial pilots usually try to avoid.
5 In order to scare the hell out of Newport Beach and make sure its residents continue to support a massive international airport at El Toro, county planners came up with Plan G. If El Toro doesn’t get the go-ahead, Plan G would kick in: John Wayne Airport gets a few additional thousand feet of runway, huge swaths of commercial land around the field get swallowed up (including the corporate park that houses OC Weekly World Headquarters), and 25 million passengers fly in and out of the terminal every year to points around the globe. Ironically, anti-airport supervisors have tried to kill Plan G; not so surprisingly, pro-airport supervisors have successfully voted to keep it alive. What’s even scarier is that many Newport Beach residents might actually believe the county would blast their city off the map with this monster.
6 Two words: baggage claim.
7 Because El Toro would open in the middle of one of the largest concentrations of airports in the world, it would hurl 150 planes into already-existing flight paths every day.
8 Commercial airliners and airports are the biggest unregulated sources of air pollution in the world. Airports typically emit more nitrogen oxides and volatile organics (what you and I call smog) than most power plants and industrial centers. According to a 1996 Natural Resources Defense Council report on airliner pollution, "If the relationship between airplanes, airports and air pollution is not thoroughly re-examined, [the predicted] increase in flights will undoubtedly lead to a continued increase in uncontrolled, local air pollution."
9 Despite county officials’ assurances that they’d work to get nighttime curfews at El Toro, no such restrictions appear in the El Toro Airport System Master Plan. Instead, planners proposed voluntary, non-binding agreements with each airline, limiting the flights of aircraft during late-night and early morning hours. Since the Federal Aviation Administration isn’t involved with these agreements, it’s unclear how many—if any—airlines will go for this scheme.
10 No commercial airlines have expressed any interest to the county in either moving their operations from John Wayne Airport or opening additional, redundant gates at El Toro.
11 County El Toro spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Tom Wall (USMC, Retired). Paid $5,000 per month to speak to civic groups on the county’s plans for El Toro, Wall is also executive director of the Newport Beach-based pro-airport group Orange County Airport Alliance. Wall, who flew helicopters in the Marines and has never logged a single hour in a commercial airliner (except, we presume, as a passenger), likes to tell crowds that El Toro "is in fact an international airport today." When faced with questions about commercial pilots’ unions criticizing El Toro’s eastern-facing Runway 7 for its nearly constant tail winds, Wall typically responds with the authority of one who would know that "wind direction is not even an issue when talking about today’s commercial airliners."
12 The county’s June 4 and 5, 1999, series of demonstration flights in and out of El Toro designed to "calm the fears" of residents worried that a future El Toro International Airport would destroy their quality of life actually did nothing of the sort. In fact, the tests were bogus from the outset, producing "no usable data," as then-El Toro program manager Courtney Wiercioch acknowledged afterward. Residents still rose up in indignation, even though the test planes were lightly loaded and flew along special flight tracks and used departure procedures that significantly cut their noise.
13 We have no real affection for 5th District Supervisor Tom Wilson—his relationship with Don Bren’s Irvine Co. is a little too cozy for our tastes—but his getting passed over for chairman of the board twice is ridiculous. What makes the three pro-airport supervisors on the board so terrified of anti-airport Wilson sitting in the center seat? Is their hold over the airport planning process that tenuous?
14 In a June 14, 1999, letter to El Toro Airport Info Web site editor Len Kranser, American Airlines vice president Robert W. Baker wrote that his company disagreed strongly with the county’s reliance on infamous Runway 7, noting that "Runway 7 with a tail wind component and rising terrain will never be considered desirable or preferable from an airline or pilot’s point of view" and predicted that "you can fully expect most pilots to reject an offer of Runway 7," potentially throwing the county’s "preferred runway" plan for El Toro into chaos.
15 Twenty-seven years ago, the all-powerful Irvine Co.—which now pretends to be neutral on the El Toro issue—found the prospect of a massive commercial airport on the Irvine doorstep too awful to contemplate: "Civilian or dual use of either or both the two Marine Corps air facilities shall be opposed for reasons of safety and environmental compatibility," wrote Irvine Co. vice president for planning Richard A. Reese in an Oct. 5, 1972, letter to the Orange County Planning Commission. "It shall be a policy to cooperate in the planning of systems which provide ground-transportation linkages to air-transportation facilities."
16 A 1980 noise study of neighborhoods near LAX conducted by UC Irvine social ecology professor Dan Stokols shows that children in El Segundo and Inglewood schools under that airport’s flight path experienced higher stress than children in quieter schools. "Blood pressure in children went up after initial exposure to the noise but then stabilized after prolonged exposure," said Stokols in 1997. "Adrenaline secretions went up, too, but didn’t stabilize."
17 First, way back in August 1996, county officials said a truly massive, 38 million-annual-passenger airport would cost just $1.5 billion. That’s it—just about the amount of money blown in the 1994 county bankruptcy. Then, for a long time, county officials stopped talking about cost. When Christmas 1999 finally came around, county officials rolled out a new plan—half as big as the 1996 proposal but costing twice as much.
18 On Oct. 26, 1999, a week after voting to extend the contracts of three county El Toro planning managers, chairman of the Board of Supervisors Chuck Smith attended a $250-per-head fund-raiser at George Argyros’ Arnel Development offices. Also in attendance were three pro-airport Newport Beach City Council members, Argyros mouthpiece and former 3rd District Supervisor Bruce Nestande, big-time Newport Beach city lobbyist Lyle Overby, and Argyros PR consultants Dave Ellis and Scott Hart.
19 "[W]e may eventually be stuck with an airport layout that, while it looks great by itself on paper, is virtually unusable from an integrated [air-traffic-control] standpoint," wrote FAA official Walter White in an Aug. 4, 1999, office e-mail concerning El Toro. "I do not look forward to the years of safety problems and litigation we might undergo as we work to fix a bad initial plan. Many of the plans reviewed to date have significant problems."
20 The county plans to place El Toro’s 11-acre fuel-tank farm—eight massive tanks holding 14 million gallons of highly combustible jet fuel—near the railroad tracks along the base’s southern edge. That’s a mere 1,000 feet from Technology Drive, home to many of the high-tech firms that make up the Irvine Spectrum.
21 The county’s great 770-acre regional park that wraps around El Toro’s eastern-perimeter crash zones, which county officials advertised as opening in 2003, is actually one of the lowest construction priorities at the base. It won’t open until sometime after 2015, according to the Airport System Master Plan’s construction schedule. But the base’s two golf courses will open by 2005, showing the county’s true priorities when it comes to planting grass.
22 Considering all the hype surrounding El Toro’s economic benefits to the county, county planners estimate the new airport will create just 32,000 jobs and $3 billion in economic output over the next 20 years —exactly what it costs to build.
23 In 1998, 3.5 percent fewer passengers used John Wayne Airport than the previous year. In fact, 20 of the 25 months between October 1997 and November 1999 showed lower passenger use at John Wayne Airport than during the same month in the previous year. Passenger demand is only now climbing to 1997 levels. Clearly, John Wayne Airport is stagnating at roughly 7 million passengers per year. Where is the "rising demand" county officials trumpet when explaining the need for a massive international airport at El Toro?
24 The county’s "turnkey" El Toro International Airport is actually a construction job of Hoover Dam proportions. Because the county wants to reshape the base’s slope, it will have to add 5.9 million cubic yards of dirt to the base’s northwestern and southwestern quadrants. To put that into perspective, the famous Colorado River dam contains only 4.5 million cubic yards of concrete. Bringing the dirt to the base will be a job in itself:it will require 30,000 railcars, which, if linked in one train, would stretch 340 miles.
25 The county has already wasted more than $40 million planning five different airport proposals—none of which will work.
26 Old Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino is 45 air miles from El Toro and is open for commercial flights.
27 "More than enough safety issues have surfaced out of the county’s proposed El Toro airport configuration and proposed operations that we think that the best interests of the flying public are not being taken into account," wrote former FAA associate administrator Don Segner in an Oct. 31, 1997, letter to FAA director Jane Garvey. "The people of Orange County need to know what the noise and environmental impacts will be. Lack of information as to the real noise impacts is misleading many buyers and developers."
28 To promote their vaunted airport, county PR flacks have spun some of the emptiest promises we’ve seen since the bankruptcy. Did you know that "our continued prosperity depends on our ability to become a full-fledged member of the global community"? Or that the proposed airport will "help the economy soar" and "lift the spirits of recreation-minded residents"? Even if the county gets its way, the airport won’t open until 2005—but can we have those airsick bags now?
29 Chronic exposure to jet noise is dangerous. According to Arline Bronzaft, a noise specialist at the City University of New York, listening to airplanes day and night can raise blood pressure and cause psychiatric disorders. In addition, a 1995 study by Barbara Luke at the University of Michigan concluded that sustained noise can stimulate stress hormones in pregnant women, leading to premature contractions.
30 Residents around El Toro will hear 80 to 90 decibels from every airplane landing and taking off. That’s really loud. But the county insists that nearby residents "will experience little or no noise." That’s because state law only requires them to analyze noise averaged over a 24-hour period, as opposed to single-event noise—imagine the sounds of a car crash in your living room averaged out over the course of the day. The result, of course, is that the county benefits from mishandled newspaper accounts saying residents will only have to face 65 decibels of noise from the airport.
31 Page 1-6 of the county’s 10,000-page Draft Environmental Impact Report lists unresolved issues surrounding El Toro. The most important: "Method of delivering aviation fuel to El Toro for the project." In other words, the county is about to start building a $3 billion airport, and their planners have no clue how they’re going to get 14 million gallons of jet fuel to that massive tank farm they spent so much time and money designing.
32 Sleek, modern airports like Denver International typically pop up in flat, empty areas far away from population centers and inconvenient terrain. El Toro is an exception: not only do hundreds of thousands of people live within a couple of miles of its tarmac, but hills also surround the base on three sides. Only the base’s western edge lacks rising terrain, but county officials say no aircraft will take off in that direction—doing so would hurl planes directly at John Wayne Airport.
33 The nation’s two largest commercial pilots’ unions, the Air Line Pilots Association and the Allied Pilots Association—which between them represent thousands of pilots —oppose the county’s proposed El Toro runway layout. Their reasons: El Toro’s runways slope upward into rising terrain, making engine-out procedures (when an aircraft loses an engine while taking off) tricky and scary.
34 In April 1998, the aviation firm Jeppesen Sanderson handed its two-volume Jeppesen Analyses report on El Toro to the county. That report, containing hundreds of pages of tables detailing departure weights for every conceivable airliner under every conceivable temperature situation, proves that El Toro’s eastern-facing Runway 7 —slated to handle 62 percent of all departures—forces significant weight penalties on all aircraft. The report also makes clear these penalties don’t exist on other runways. County officials’ continued insistence that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Runway 7 has led many critics to wonder whether they are stupid or just plain dishonest.
35 For an airport slated to move 2.2 million tons of cargo every year by 2020, it’s too bad air cargo companies couldn’t care less about El Toro. "UPS is very pleased with its operations at John Wayne Airport," wrote an official from that company to the county on Jan. 18, 1999. When Airborne Express submitted its interim cargo plan for El Toro, it called for a mere 10 operations per week—four of which would require only a single-engine prop plane. Even Federal Express, which supports an airport at El Toro, called for only a dozen operations per week. Of course, interim cargo at El Toro is now dead, but it’s doubtful any of these companies care.
36 "I really doubt that those runways as they are will be your runways," said Mary Schiavo, former federal Department of Transportation inspector general, on Oct. 1, 1998. "They will have to be rotated." In other words, the runways point in the wrong directions and ideally would run parallel to the 5 freeway. Schiavo, a nationally recognized authority on airport and airline safety, also predicted that because John Wayne Airport is just seven miles from El Toro, it would close once El Toro opens.
37 County officials like to say that, unless you live in a zone exposed to 65 decibels of noise averaged over 24 hours (called 65 CNEL), you won’t hear anything from El Toro. Yet this completely contradicts evidence from John Wayne Airport, where the residents who complain the most about airplane noise to that airport’s noise office live in Balboa and Corona del Mar—four miles from the John Wayne CNEL zone. For the hundreds of thousands of residents who live similar distances from El Toro, good luck.
38 "People ask, ‘Where are people that are on welfare right now going to find jobs?’" said 2nd District Supervisor, airport booster and New Voice of the Downtrodden Jim Silva on the Feb. 2, 1998, episode of KOCE’s Real Orange news program. "Well, there are a lot of low-skill jobs with every airport that will take care of a lot of communities that have a lot of people who have a hard time getting jobs."
39 For all the county’s talk about building a giant park at El Toro, the FAA generally frowns on planting big trees and filling deep ponds mere yards from the runways. The reason: birds. It’s too easy for small birds to get sucked into big jet turbines at inopportune moments like landings and takeoffs. FAA Advisory Circular 150/5200-33, titled "Hazardous Wildlife Attractants on or Near Airports," makes it clear nothing that attracts birds should sit within 10,000 feet of any runway or taxiway.
40 Megadeveloper, bazillionaire and right-wing political benefactor George Argyros wants it.
41 When taking off, a jumbo jet airliner will devour more than 500,000 gallons of air per second. After five minutes, it has consumed the air produced by 50,000 acres of forest. That same airliner typically spends 32 minutes taxiing on the ground, during which it emits 190 pounds of ozone-depleting nitrogen oxide. By 2020, the airline industry estimates there will be 20,000 such airliners in the skies.
42 The county continues to insist that El Toro is a turnkey operation: open the gates and let the airlines fly in. But according to the 1994 study on El Toro conducted by Kotin, Regan & Mouchly for the city of Laguna Niguel, El Toro’s runways, hangars and air-traffic-control center are all outdated and useless for a commercial airport. In addition, the report noted that of all Southern California airport sites, El Toro has "the highest potential civilian casualties in the event of an airplane crash due to the extensive residential and commercial development."
43 According to calculations by Albert E. Domke, operational engineering manager for United Airlines, the airline’s Boeing 757s can only take off from El Toro’s Runway 7 with 94.5 percent of their maximum payload under calm conditions and just 76.9 percent when 7-knot tail winds are blowing across the pavement.
44 To clarify such a "technical" issue as noise, county officials hauled out noise consultant Vince Mestre for an April 7, 1998, "educational" briefing for the county Board of Supervisors. During his presentation, Mestre offered such insights as "There is a relationship between noise exposure and the population that is affected by noise" and "Studies of human response to noise have shown that human response to noise is very complex." Needless to say, the only noise heard during the board meeting was snoring.
45 Page 6-9 of the county’s Airport System Master Plan shows how all four El Toro runways are completely useless and have to go. During construction Phase 1, "the existing 10,000-foot Runway 16R/ 34L will be reconstructed." Phase 2 will see that runway extended a half-mile, as well as the construction of "a new Runway 16L/ 34R." Runway 7R/25L will also have to be "reconstructed." Nothing will happen in Phase 3, but Phase 4 "calls for the construction of a new Runway 7L/25R."
46 The county calls El Toro a "midsize" airport. But the Airport System Master Plan says that in 2020, there will be 412 arrivals and 412 departures every day—824 operations in all. That works out to an average of one operation every two minutes. All day and all night. Sleep tight.
47 Los Angeles International Airport sucked an average of 27.4 percent from the property values of homes surrounding that airport, according to a study by licensed real-estate appraiser Randall Bell. The same study also shows commercial office buildings directly under the LAX flight path along Century Boulevard have a 38.1 percent vacancy rate—17 percent higher than comparable buildings just a couple of miles away.
48 Old George Air Force Base in Victorville is 60 air miles from El Toro and also open for commercial flights.
49 Sometimes, county officials’ giddy anticipation of flying hundreds of thousands of planes into El Toro every year gets to them. According to Page 3-3 of the county’s 1998 Working Paper 3—JWA/OCA Simulation Assumptions report, El Toro International Airport’s "terminal building will have an infinite number of gates to accommodate all aircraft." In addition, "a similar gate with infinite capacity will be created at the airport for general aviation aircraft and for cargo operations." We’d like to say that’s a lot of people, but we can’t count to infinity.
50 Although county officials like to say that their proposed El Toro International Airport will actually make air quality better here than if nothing is built (stop laughing), Page 4.5-5 of the DEIR says different. A section called "Project Impacts on Regional Air Quality" makes clear that El Toro "would result in exceedances [sic] of all criteria pollutants (CO, NOx, ROC and particulate matter [PM10]). Three of these increases (CO, NOx and PM10) would exceed the operational thresholds established by the [Southern California Air Quality Management District]."
Money and Lies
by Anthony Pignataro, June 1, 2001
For years, John Wayne Airport (JWA) billed itself as "crowd-free." Ads for the airport in the Los Angeles Times and The Orange County Register boasted that fact. Come fly with us, the ads seemed to say, because no one else is.
The ads were—and are—true. Walk into the main terminal at almost any hour of the day, and you’ll find a lot of vacant seats, empty luggage carousels and bored staff. Film studios rent out the joint whenever they want to shoot airport scenes without the bother of unplanned cameos.
Since it’s hard for the county to promote its big, proposed El Toro International Airport with a ghost town of an airport sitting just seven miles away, officials probably figured they should try a new marketing tack. Not only are the words "crowd-free" gone from current JWA ads, but in the Spring 2001 issue of JWA Today, the latest edition of the airport’s online newsletter, airport officials are now spinning 2000 as the airport’s "busiest year ever."
This is mostly true: 7,772,801 passengers used JWA last year, which technically makes it "the highest annual figure in our history." Alas, this "banner year" appears more like a blip in JWA’s overall lackluster service history. In 1996, JWA’s passenger-service number rose to 7.3 million, prompting the Orange County Business Journal to report gleefully that "probably no later than 1998, the airport should reach its court-mandated cap of 8.4 million passengers per year." Demand did rise by 400,000 the next year, but then it dropped to 7.4 million, where it remained until last year.
Undaunted, officials are predicting even greater figures for this year, trumpeting an infinitesimal 0.5 percent growth in passenger service in January over the same time last year. Unfortunately for the county, which seems so desperately to want JWA to burst at the seams, passenger-demand figures at the airport dropped for the following three months—a dramatic 8.2 percent in February, 4.9 percent in March, and 6.4 percent in April.
Underlying the numbers is this fact: there simply aren’t a lot of Orange County residents who need to fly every year. The county’s own Technical Report 17, published in December 1999 and detailing JWA demand, suggests that OC’s "passenger deficiency"—the number of passengers who can’t be served at JWA—is 5 million, not the 12 million figure offered by LAX expansion opponent and El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon and by the Times editorial page. Without restrictions, JWA could serve 15 million passengers per year, far more than even the county says we need.
These facts aside, county officials insist on acting as if their airport is lousy with tourists, implying that the place has become a kind of Calcutta teeming with weary travelers. That’s propaganda. So was this: in an apparently counterintuitive move, the county and the Newport Beach City Council recently announced they want to raise JWA’s capacity from 8.4 million to 9.8 million passengers per year. The goal is obvious: terrify Newport Beach residents into believing JWA is growing, and they’ll open their wallets to pay for more propaganda, which will produce more terror, more wallet opening and more propaganda, forever, in an endless cycle of money and lies.
—Anthony Pignataro
El Toro Airport Watch
by Anthony Pignataro, May 4, 2001
It is a fact that the County plans to build a massive international airport at El Toro in which commercial airliners will arrive and depart 24 hours per day.
The county’s still-unapproved Environmental Impact Report (EIR) makes this explicit: 300,574 proposed flights per year, or roughly 411.7 flights per day. That’s every day, all day, all night. The county even broke this number down further, estimating 137.4 arrivals and 129.4 departures at night. These figures dwarf annual operations at John Wayne Airport, which ends its operations at 11 p.m. every night.
There is no way airport boosters can reconcile these facts with their public claims that the county will only build a "John Wayne-sized" airport with a ban on nighttime flights at El Toro. Undaunted, the County Board of Supervisors—now two years behind schedule in approving the new El Toro EIR—just voted to try to do exactly that by paying an astonishing $3 million to Irvine-based Amies Communications for a brand-new "El Toro public-information program."
Considering the size and cost of the contract, the scope of work is surprisingly vague, spelling out two central directives for Amies in thoroughly misleading corporate-speak: "communicate factual data" and "encourage public participation."
The program calls for constructing an El Toro Visitor’s Center at the base itself, housing reuse information, Marine Corps history, a new El Toro website and a program logo. In addition, there would be a speakers’ bureau and a standard package of mailers, brochures and newsletters. The company also wants to develop and distribute something called a "CD-ROM Business Card" that contains all their slick promotional materials in electronic form.
Further down the proposal is a call for "re-establishing relationships with the media," "developing a proactive media-relations program" and "creating and coordinate [sic] media events, news releases and articles." Promotional materials posted on Amies’ website provide a colorful glimpse into what reporters have in store for them. On a page titled "Keys to Media Interviews," Amies offers that spokespeople should be "as open, frank and engaging as possible without revealing any sensitive issues." Spokespeople should also be "prepared to ‘turn’ questions to your liking" and always remember that an "energized voice makes you sound enthusiastic and sincere about your company and its projects."
In case all this sounds familiar, it’s because the county already went down the public relations-firm road three years ago. Back in 1997, the county spent $326,010—a tenth of what Amies will get—on Irvine-based Nelson Communications Group for the first El Toro public-information program. That contract included much of the same materials as proposed by Amies: a website, glossy brochures, slick mailers, event kiosks and even a shiny new logo.
The original Nelson proposal—designed to "acknowledge and empathize" with local residents—included a call for developing a "grassroots campaign fabric" for El Toro because "the media, by nature, have trouble with complex issues." The final result of the Nelson contract: 67 percent of voters in March 2000 approved anti-airport Measure F.
County supervisors never put the contract out to bid, awarding it to Amies, a company run by airport booster Bruce Nestande’s former brother-in-law that specializes in promoting high-tech companies and cookie-cutter housing developments—not high-profile, incredibly controversial political projects.
One of Amies’ current clients is Southern California Logistics Airport (SCLA) in Victorville, but that airport has only been open since 1994 and has been struggling for business every step of the way. So far, SCLA has just one commercial airline and one cargo flight flying in and out per week.
All of this PR money comes on top of $5 million the county already gave to pro-airport cities to promote the airport, and over $3 million set aside by Newport Beach for the same purpose.
Pro-airport supervisor Chuck Smith says all this money is necessary to counter the South County’s "outright lies." But it’s also important to remember that South County wants to build the Great Park at El Toro—a plan completely endorsed by the residents who live around El Toro, while Smith sees public relations convincing county residents to ignore the wishes of those living around the base and getting that airport built as fast as possible.
Website Direct: In case all this sounds familiar, it’s because the county already went down the public relations-firm road three years ago. Back in 1997, the county spent $326,010—a tenth of what Amies will get—on Irvine-based Nelson Communications Group for the first El Toro public-information program. That contract included much of the same materials as proposed by Amies: a website, glossy brochures, slick mailers, event kiosks and even a shiny new logo.
Late Bloomer
El Toro Airport Watch
by Anthony Pignataro, February 16, 2001
Art Bloomer is back in town, fresh from a lucrative tour in Virginia as senior executive of a security firm. The 68-year-old retired Marine Corps general and former Irvine city councilman has a new assignment: boss of the pro-airport Orange County Regional Airport Authority (OCRAA). But Bloomer brings to the job a record his pro-airport friends may live to regret.
Despite its official-sounding acronym, OCRAA has played almost no role in El Toro politics. Ostensibly representing 14 pro-airport cities, the group is funded almost entirely by the city of Newport Beach and the county. They will pay Bloomer’s $120,000-per-year salary.
The general has built a record for inaccuracy atop a now-infamous July 25, 1993, Los Angeles Times op-ed piece. In it, he bizarrely asserted that "converting El Toro to an operational civilian airport is essentially a turnkey operation": unlock the gates, and the passenger jets can begin landing from all over the world.
The county’s own airport plans expose this assertion for what it is: crap. At the very least, the official Airport System Master Plan indicates that county engineers will have to rip out and replace all four El Toro runways over the next 20 years. Total cost: at least $3 billion.
But besides not understanding airport economics, Bloomer is also a first-class hypocrite—something that may haunt him in his new capacity. Hypocrisy is a common enough character defect among El Toro’s backers, most of whom are Newport Beach conservatives who hate living near John Wayne Airport but insist that South County residents are rich whiners who ought to embrace an airport four times larger for the good of the community.
But lest we forget it, Bloomer’s peculiar brand of self-contradiction warrants precise documentation. He is, in fact, a newcomer to the pro-airport ranks: in the early 1990s, as an Irvine City Council member, Bloomer was an outspoken opponent of a commercial airport at El Toro.
Bloomer was elected to the Irvine City Council in 1990 on a platform of "working for the public good by seeing to it we fulfill the general plan"—a plan that doesn’t include anything like 800 commercial-airline over-flights per day. He even served for a time as chairman of the Coalition for Responsible Airport Solutions, the first real anti-airport group.
As a councilman, Bloomer voted to approve a city of Irvine plan to annex the base. That, of course, would kill the airport baby in the cradle—a good thing as far as Bloomer was then concerned. His reason: although he thought a commercial airport was turnkey, he also thought it would destroy Irvine and South County.
Bloomer’s views from those days are so relevant today they deserve full reprinting. "Now that El Toro will close, the city of Irvine should pursue annexation, since the base lies within the city’s sphere of influence," he wrote in the same July 1993 op-ed piece. "This action is appropriate to put the city in the strongest legal position possible to determine the airport and other land uses resulting from the conversion of El Toro."
Bloomer pushed for annexation even after he left the council in June 1993, and Irvine works from that policy today. He explained the necessity of annexation so eloquently that it’s hard to improve on it. "The communities most impacted by the reuse of El Toro should have the greatest voice in determining what the reuse should be, and that voice should have the force of law behind it," he wrote. "It should not be just a council member’s lone voice on another advisory committee."
Now Bloomer is just another mercenary, heading one of the groups trying to screw the people "most impacted by the reuse of El Toro"—the people he once called his constituents. This is how Bloomer translates "Semper Fidelis"?
Ain't No Mountain Low EnoughEl Toro Airport Watch
by Anthony Pignataro, February 2, 2001
The county’s proposed El Toro International Airport is the answer to a question no one asked. At tremendous cost—in money and in environmental impact—the airport would allow more than 800 additional commercial airliners to fly in and out of the county every day, as though that’s the one puzzle piece left to complete the image of a truly modern Orange County.
The airport, with a current estimated cost of $3 billion and rising, does nothing to answer the most important transportation question facing the county: how to deal with exploding commute times. Though Riverside and Orange counties are growing, and highway traffic between them is almost a constant gridlock, the county continues to sink billions into an airport plan that would likely make things much worse.
"We’re running out of time and options," said Bill Vardoulis, head of Irvine-based BV Engineering. "We’re expecting peak traffic to be four hours each way from Orange County to Riverside. This is the biggest transportation problem we’ve ever seen."
His proposed solution is radical: dig three 40-foot-diameter tunnels beneath the Santa Ana Mountains and the Cleveland National Forest. If built, the tunnels could cut commutes from Irvine to Riverside to just 15 minutes. That brings March Air Force Base—now a commercial airport starving for flights—a lot closer. Such proximity would go a long way toward meeting the county’s future air-traffic demands.
Promotional material supplied by Vardoulis shows the tunnels would be 12 miles long. He says stairways would link the tunnels every 1,000 feet. Vardoulis isn’t yet sure whether to allow cars and trucks to drive through the tunnels or to pull them along on a conveyor, similar to —but much faster than—those that pull cars through a car wash. Two of the tunnels would carry cars as well as high-voltage transmission cables, fiber optics and oil. The third and lower tunnel would carry trucks, possibly rail lines and water from Lake Matthews.
It’s a colorful idea from a colorful guy. An engineer by training, Vardoulis was one of the earliest mayors of Irvine. During that tenure, he proposed burning waste to produce energy and argued that the city ought to purchase the Irvine Co. Both ideas died quickly.
Vardoulis says his inspiration for the tunnels was a Metropolitan Water District plan to dig an 18-mile-long, 15-foot-diameter water pipe along roughly the same alignment. That plan was abandoned for lack of public money. Vardoulis says he wants to fund the tunnels privately. "If you did it right and combined uses, this thing could probably pencil out privately," said Vardoulis, who estimates construction costs at $2 billion. "I’ve got a letter from the Irvine Co. saying I’m woefully underestimating the cost, and that may be so, but keep in mind, I’m not talking about using taxpayer dollars." Vardoulis estimates he can build the tunnels in just two to three years. By comparison, the county’s airport plans are nearly 5 years old and face at least a generation of court battles.
The environmental impacts are pretty obvious, most notably on the canyon residents who live near the proposed Orange County opening at Silverado Canyon. Of course, canyon residents all over South County will take it in the shorts if the county clears commercial operations at El Toro.
Flack Attack
El Toro Airport Watch
by Anthony Pignataro, January 26, 2001
The county has at last dropped the gloves. On Jan. 4, the Three Amigos—Supervisors Chuck Smith, Jim Silva and Cynthia Coad—approved a monster $1.5 million plan to push the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of the Navy to hand over El Toro, allowing commercial flights to begin immediately.
The biggest surprise about the decision is that it surprised anyone. Contrary to the cock-a-doodle-doo of Newport Beach consultants and county officials, their El Toro project is in real trouble. Sure, county attorneys got the popular anti-airport Measure F tossed off the books, but what else has the county done lately?
Short answer: nada. Nearly every El Toro-related issue taken up by the county Board of Supervisors has been a failure. Official planning studies and environmental reports have been late and sloppy. The high-profile noise tests during the summer of 1999 only inflamed local hatred culminating in the 67 percent approval vote for Measure F.
The Marines bugged out nearly two years ago. The county’s own interim uses—supposedly set up to make money —were designed to fail, a plan to discredit all base uses save those involving commercial airliners.
And, of course, there’s the county’s abysmal relations with Washington, which still holds the deed to the El Toro base. Federal officials showed Smith and Silva the door in late November, when the two supes traveled to Washington with hopes of fast-tracking aviation approval of the base (see "Duck, Supe," Dec. 22).
Hence the county’s top-flight lobbying crew. The Jan. 4 package includes such polynominative firms as Hill & Knowlton; Higgins, McGovern & Smith; Boland & Madigan; Glenn B. LeMunyon & Associates; and former H & K lobbyist Fred DuVal, who just struck out on his own and is now quarterbacking the county’s Beltway play.
Data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington shows that these lobbying firms have represented many of the richest and most powerful corporations in the nation—some directly affected by the county’s actions on El Toro: the Air Transport Association of America, America West Airlines, American Airlines, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, AT&T, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Motorola, the National Association of Manufacturers, Oracle, and Playboy Enterprises.
South County activists and attorneys are hard at work crafting yet another ballot measure—this one designed to negate the airport-zoning designation for El Toro mandated by old Measure A from 1994. That’s fine and absolutely necessary, but just as important is real agitation.
County supervisor meetings are long; they should be made much longer by public denunciations of any and all El Toro spending. The time has come to pack every supervisors’ meeting, regardless of what’s on the agenda. The time has come to push and shove and shout and jab.
The people have already spoken. It’s time to make the elected county supervisors listen.
The Board of Supervisors meets at the Board Hearing Room, First Floor, 10 Civic Center Plaza, Santa Ana. Every Tues., 9:30 a.m.
Duck, Supe
Feds hand Supervisor Chuck Smith his head in descussion of El Toro Airport
by Anthony Pignataro, December 22 2000
Despite recent promises of a smaller, "friendlier" airport, county officials secretly continue to plan for a monster international airport at El Toro.
In a Nov. 29 meeting at the White House, county Supervisor Chuck Smith told federal officials the county is looking toward an airport several times larger than the more politically palatable models offered in recent weeks.
"We never planned to have a 38 MAP [million annual passengers] airport right off," Smith said, according to notes from the meeting. "It will be developed in phases. Maybe start with an 8 MAP —building to an 18 or 28 MAP. Other boards will make future decisions whether or not to build larger airports based on demand. The plan may very well be downsized, maybe built out later or sooner."
Smith’s comment is included in notes from the meeting obtained by El Toro Info Site editor Len Kranser and posted on his website (www.eltoroairport.org/ news/whitehouse.html).
Smith’s description paints a starkly different picture of the county’s plans for El Toro. Cynthia Coad, Smith’s board colleague, has tried to sell angry South County residents on a more neighborly El Toro Airport. Coad’s proposals paralleled those of the airport’s biggest booster, real-estate mogul George Argyros.
The meeting notes suggest that Argyros’ public proposal bugged the pro-airport Smith. "Argyros wants a smaller airport . . . thinks he can run this show," Smith reportedly told officials of the Navy Department and the Federal Aviation Administration. He was apparently referring to Argyros’ recent op-ed piece in the Los Angeles Times calling for an airport "that would serve, at most" 14 million to 18 million passengers every year.
Smith traveled to Washington with fellow Supervisor Jim Silva and other pro-airport county officials. They hoped the 75-minute meeting would lead the feds to grant "conditional approval"—a quick sign-off on the county’s airport plan that would allow commercial flights at El Toro immediately.
But the notes show that federal officials killed that dream.
"We cannot move ahead with conditional approval," Navy official William Cassidy told Smith, according to the notes. "The best we can do is act after the reuse [environmental impact report] is certified" in September 2001. Translation: federal officials will do nothing until the county has approved its master plan and accompanying EIR late next year. Following that approval, it’s likely airport opponents would do what they’ve always done: sue the county. That means more delays; more grass sprouting out of cracks in the runways, more years without a single plane landing at El Toro.
Smith twice suggested Cassidy’s time line would "kill us."
There was more bad news for Smith. The notes suggest that Silva, Smith’s longtime board ally, is waffling on the airport. Notorious for being led through board meetings with note cards, Silva at one point asked FAA officials a simple yet astute question: "Does the FAA want additional airport capacity in the Southern California region?"
The notes show FAA officials balked, calling it "an unfair question." This irritated Silva, who responded, "If there is no need, I’d just [as] soon forget the whole thing."
Emerging from the meeting with his coalition in tatters and his plans a flaming wreck, Smith told The Orange County Register that White House officials assured him they would help him out. Said Smith, "I was very pleased."
The Great Park is Coming Back
El Toro Airport Watch No. 149
by Anthony Pignataro, December 1, 2000On Dec. 12, the Irvine City Council—with Larry Agran once again sitting as mayor—will end the divisive politics that plagued the council before the Nov. 7 election and reassert the city’s No. 1 priority: burying the county’s hated El Toro International Airport beneath a thousand-acre Great Park.
"The first item on the agenda will be to rescind the Musick jail agreement," said Agran, speaking of the plan developed by Sheriff Mike Carona and the city councils of Lake Forest and Irvine to add 4,600 beds to the jail during the next 15 years. "That will be over quickly, and the next item will be the El Toro matter."
Shortly before Election Day, with then-Councilman Agran and former Mayor Christina Shea out of town, the three remaining council members voted to end city planning of the Great Park. They claimed a city study showed the park was financially unworkable. In fact, the move was a blatant attempt to remove the engine of Agran’s mayoral campaign. It failed. Agran ran unopposed and succeeded in getting two allies on the council—Chris Mears and Beth Krom.
Now, Agran says he and his new council majority will repair the damage inflicted before Nov. 7. "We’ll reaffirm the city’s previous policy of going forward full speed ahead," said Agran. "We will give people confidence that we intend to achieve this during the next two to four years."
First elected to the City Council in 1978, Agran was derided by local conservatives as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda’s man in Irvine. They attacked his slow-growth politics, his liberal views and even his Jewish background. He was the subject of bitter, sometimes weekly attacks by editorial staff at The Orange County Register. His name raised money for the Right the way Bob Dornan’s did for the Left. None of it mattered: within four years, Agran was sitting in the council’s center seat as mayor.
He would remain there throughout the Reagan years, bringing about such innovations as a curbside recycling program and a citywide ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)—both revolutionary for their time and both mimicked nationwide today. But his successful fights to permanently preserve open space and extend civil rights to gays and lesbians in the city produced the first effective anti-Agran coalition in 1990, when right-wing conservatives backed by the Irvine Co. finally defeated him.
Now Agran is returning to the mayor’s chair after being re-elected to the City Council in 1998. With the city already spending $5 million per year studying and promoting the Great Park, Agran wants to step up the pressure. He foresees a ballot campaign in the spring or fall of 2002 to finally repeal Measure A—something anti-airport forces failed to do back in 1996. The destruction of Measure A would also destroy the legal mandate that has so far driven the county’s airport plans.
By then, Agran is confident that Irvine —with its fully developed park plan—will become the lead planning agency for the El Toro base. That, he says, will represent the final burial of the airport under the grass of the Great Park.
The Great Farce
El Toro Airport Watch No. 148
by Anthony Pignataro, November 10th, 2000The Irvine City Council resembles the county Board of Supervisors a lot more than members of either panel might want to admit. Both have five members. Both have one member who is a complete moron. Both have just one member who believes in penetrating questions and simple accountability. Both approve nearly every development permit that comes before them. And as recent events show, both are working very hard to put an international airport at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.
Concerning the last note, the biggest offender is clearly the Irvine City Council. Everyone in the county already knows that three of the five supes would personally fly the first commercial airliner into El Toro if they could. But it’s the Irvine City Council, with its empty, vacillating rhetoric about replacing the hated airport with a Great Park, that poses the most danger.
All year, the Irvine City Council made a great show about how the vast majority of the public supported turning most of the El Toro base into an urban public park. The council voted 5-0 last spring to spend $4 million on Great Park-related items, including $2.5 million on Great Park mailings to the entire county.
"Within a year," powerful city-paid consultant Arnold Forde told me in the spring, "everyone in the county will have a feeling about what’s going on."
No one can say Forde was exaggerating. On Oct. 24, those "die-hard" anti-airport activists on the council voted 3-0 (Larry Agran and Mayor Christina Shea were absent) to kill the Great Park. They did this—ostensibly—because they had determined that the city couldn’t afford to pay for park upkeep and that it would be better for all concerned if Sacramento put a state park on the site.
This is bullshit. For months, the entire city council has been actively promoting itself as the best manager of any future park at El Toro. It thus comes as no surprise that the offending councilmen who voted to trash the Great Park—Mike Ward, who never met an Irvine Co. proposal he didn’t like; Greg Smith, who’s endorsed by both the right-wing Lincoln Club and the Building Industry Association; and Dave Christensen, who’s currently facing a seven-count conflict-of-interest investigation by the state Fair Political Practices Commission—had no studies or reports to back up their contention that the park was prohibitively expensive.
A Review of Potential Revenue Sources for Funding the Millennium Phase Three Master Plan, the only study on the subject, states that park funding is easily accessible to the city. The council tried to dismiss that $60,000 city-sponsored study by calling it "unfinished" and burying it. Agran negated that move by releasing the report—which clearly says "Final Report" on the cover—on his own.
For his act of giving city residents what they paid for, Agran drew formal censure from the rest of the council. In addition to blatant star-chamber arrogance, his colleagues were also being grossly hypocritical: for years, the city of Irvine has called for the county to release "draft" versions of its airport studies.
Clearly, the council couldn’t care less about the park—not with crazy, pro-accountability Larry Agran roaming loose through the halls of city government. Agran, who is running unopposed for mayor, boosts the park every chance he gets; taking it away from him potentially guts his slate of candidates, who are campaigning both for the Great Park and the council seats held by Ward and Christensen, as well as the one being vacated by Agran.
Clearly, to Ward and Christensen, remaining on the council is more important than fighting the proposed El Toro International Airport. Why else would campaign literature for Councilman Mike Ward denounce Agran and his slate for promoting El Toro as a "homeless destination point"?
The city’s own surveys show that 90 percent of Irvine’s residents support the Great Park. It will be interesting to see what those residents do now that they know who killed it.
Waiting
El Toro Airport Watch No. 147
by Anthony Pignataro, October 6th, 2000
I wasted 82 hours of my life in the past year sitting in traffic in Southern California. Each of us did. We wasted it sitting in our cars with a bunch of other schmucks on the freeway, listening to some dork on the radio as the minutes slipped away. That’s three and a half days. Gone.
The time was lost waiting. . . . Waiting. . . . Now speeding up a bit. . . . No, gotta slow down now. . . . Stopping. . . . Waiting. . . . Watching the cars on the left roll by. . . . Okay, now speeding up again. . . . Stop! . . . Now watching the cars on the right stop. . . . Still waiting. . . . Why the hell won’t that guy go any faster?! . . . Waiting some more. . . . Okay, now I can go. . . . Slowly. . . . Slowly. . . . Damn, gotta stop again. . . . Waiting again. . . . Waiting as the rest of the cars proceed. . . . Waiting. . ..
Collectively, the nation’s drivers lost more than 8 billion hours last year to traffic congestion. Add up the costs—for gasoline, additional car maintenance and lost productivity—and the nation lost between $70 billion and $80 billion, according to the Texas Transportation Institute. That’s each year for the past decade.
Think of it as China’s new 18,000-megawatt dam, the entire National Missile Defense program or the value of last year’s historic Exxon-Mobil merger. A huge wad of cash burned each year, for no good reason.
It’s not surprising that this fact worries local companies. An Orange County Register survey of 250 business owners earlier this month found that 96 percent of the county’s companies felt that traffic was a problem—for nearly half of them, "a big problem."
As it should be: some part of that $70 billion or so could have been tallied up in their profits last year. Could have, of course, had the nation’s workers used an effective, efficient commuter transportation system.
But we have nothing like that in Orange County. Here, workers spend hours and hours each day stuck on massive freeways that sit virtually idle during the evening. Here, massive and hideously expensive toll roads slip closer and closer to financial collapse as ridership consistently fails to meet even the most conservative expectations.
Here, according to a new traffic study, each day’s "rush hour" will nearly double, from its current four hours to seven hours over the next 20 years. The Riverside Freeway alone is expected to handle a quarter of a million new daily commuters.
North County cities will weather this traffic storm first, as more and more residents of San Bernardino and Riverside counties head into Orange County to take advantage of our job growth. Improvements to handle this influx should cost $1.3 billion—if county officials can ever muster the political support to send new roads slashing through Chino Hills and Tonner Canyon. Other improvements, like an intercounty light-rail line and vastly expanded bus service, get minimal mention.
But the county’s supervisors continue to tell us that an international airport will solve our transportation woes—that spending billions on new runways and new hangars and new maintenance shops and new parking garages and a new terminal at El Toro will see us through into the next century.
If they get their way, we’ll all be watching the next century go by from the front seat of our cars.
Dick Nixon's Revenge
El Toro Airport Watch No. 146
by Anthony Pignataro, September 1st, 2000
For at least four years, a small group of county residents has pushed for the construction of an urban park at the now-shuttered El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. They’re not proposing your typical OC park—a sun-blasted, mile-square patch of Kentucky bluegrass mowed down to the sterile earth. They’re talking about a park as lush and relaxing—as monumental —as New York’s Central Park and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park.
Until recently, the proposal was the project of a small group of progressive, slow-growth activists working with officials at Irvine City Hall and specifically with Irvine City Councilman Larry Agran. They see it as a two-for-one deal: they bury the county’s plans for El Toro International Airport beneath rolling meadows, shade trees and trails, and they build one of the world’s great parks.
But on Aug. 13, they discovered an unlikely supporter when an old voice made a new call for the death of the county’s hated plans for an El Toro International Airport and the conversion of a large portion of the base’s 4,700 acres to parkland.
Writing in The Orange County Register, longtime Orange County Republican Party head Tom Fuentes urged readers to "forget the airport. Let the federal government transfer El Toro from the Pentagon to the Interior Department and create a park for all Americans. How about Richard Nixon Urban National Park?"
I don’t care if they stuff Nixon’s corpse and mount it at the park entrance. I’m for a park.
But Tom Fuentes? As head of the Republican party, he authorized GOP-funded poll guards in heavily Latino voting areas during the 1988 election. He’s also the chosen successor to take over Steven "The Jews Might Have Killed Kennedy" Frogue’s seat on the South Orange County Community College District (SOCCD). And yes, he’s also the guy who once told the Los Angeles Times that he could "tell you the registration of the people in a house by observing the neatness of the lawn and what cars are in the driveway."
Wooohooo! The rightest of the right-wingers, the tribal chieftain of the Republican Cavemen himself, is now standing beside liberal Larry Agran in calling for a massive people’s park at El Toro.
And he’s doing a pretty decent job. Granted, he wants to call it Nixon Park, but you have to take the good with the bad. Consider the following from his Register piece, which echoes 19th-century park designer Frederick Law Olmstead’s vision of parks as "a single work of art":
"[H]ow about a spectacular urban national park with vast green areas and plenty of orange trees to enshrine the county’s agricultural heritage and provide contact with the land for generations to come?" Fuentes wrote. "With Saddleback Mountain [sic] in the distance and the local foothills as a backdrop, an urban national park in Orange County could be a dream come true."
Fuentes also spent valuable column inches referencing his old mentor, the late 5th District Supervisor Ronald Caspers. Among the supervisor’s proudest achievements, Fuentes wrote in language that would make any slow-growth activist proud, was the supervisor’s work to preserve Newport’s Back Bay.
"Caspers wanted the Back Bay to remain undeveloped and natural for future generations," Fuentes wrote, explaining that the Irvine Co.’s early marina plans "would encroach on the pristine habitat of shore birds and local wildlife." If you believe Fuentes, Caspers killed that marina. "Thanks to Caspers’ committed efforts," Fuentes wrote, "rather than more development, wide expanses of natural open space and an ecologically sensitive county park are today on the estuary acreage amid residential surroundings."
Fuentes didn’t return the Weekly’s phone calls for this story. But it’s easy to speculate on why Fuentes decided to break his long-standing decree that in order to preserve unity, "Republicans do not speak of El Toro."
Fuentes’ appointment to the SOCCCD board runs out in November, when he says he’ll campaign for a full term. This would be the first election bid for the 51-year-old political insider. But the canny Fuentes obviously understands that the district is deep in the Saddleback Valley—solid anti-airport country. School officials may have no official role in the airport debate, but in South County elections, almost nothing else matters.
It’s just as easy to speculate that Fuentes has grander plans for himself. Whispers have floated around for years that current 3rd District Supervisor—and airport opponent—Todd Spitzer is looking for a higher office. Anyone jumping into Spitzer’s vacated chair would need solid anti-airport credentials. And the Aug. 13 Nixon Park proposal is a good start for Fuentes, a longtime 3rd District resident.
Letter to Shredder
El Toro Airport Watch No. 145
by Anthony Pignataro, August 25, 2000
In the summer of 1987, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North testified before the U.S. Senate that he once spent an entire evening shredding top-secret cables and other covert documents concerning the Iran-contra matter while Justice Department investigators worked 10 feet away.
Since then, the word "shredding" has reasonably become dark code for deceit—almost always found in close proximity to the words "conspiracy," "illegal" and "cover-up." No one, we thought—especially someone working on behalf of the public—would ever use that word to describe official policy.
We thought wrong. Consider the following excerpt from a county memo, courtesy of a public-records request by the South County cities opposed to the airport:
"After discussions with the county over the past two days, the county has asked us to reorganize the discussions of alternatives in Technical Report 1 [TR1]," chief consultant Ron Ahlfeldt wrote to the county’s remaining consultants on Sept. 12, 1997. "The county has asked that you return your copy of TR1 to us for shredding to maintain confidentiality."
Why was the county so eager to destroy evidence of TR1? Because TR1 put the lie to the county’s claim that the runways at El Toro International Airport would remain exactly as they were when the Marines ran the place.
TR1 documented the county’s dawning realization that the Marine Corps runways could never support international air traffic: they directed airplanes uphill with a tailwind into foothills; they ran dangerously across one another in an old-fashioned plus-sign, rather than parallel to one another; and they weren’t nearly thick enough for the heavy pounding they’d take from fully loaded international passenger aircraft. The solutions outlined in TR1 would cost billions of dollars and direct planes over the heart of Orange County every two minutes, 24 hours per day.
Weighing the loss in public support that would come from such a disclosure, officials ordered TR1 shredded.
Now match this naked contempt for the people who will have to live near and use the proposed airport with the county’s own "Public Information Program," begun in August 1998. That program’s chief goal was to "explain issues related to noise, safety, traffic, air quality and economic impacts in a clear, simple and [here’s the key word] accurate manner."
It’s a wonder residents still trust the county to do anything anymore.
It Could've Been the "Spitzer Plan"
El Toro Airport Watch No. 138
by Anthony Pignataro, April 7, 2000
There’s a new advertisement for john Wayne Airport running in the Los Angeles Times. Paid for by the county, the ad would fool anyone new to OC into thinking the past five years of fighting over the proposed El Toro International Airport never happened.
"Convenient. Beautiful. Crowd-free," says the ad for the airport county officials have repeatedly described as insufficient for the demands of a growing, dynamic county such as ours. Oh, and "Close to Home. Close to Perfect."
But the fight did happen, and it continues to this day. Despite such flowery rhetoric, despite the overwhelming victory of anti-airport Measure F, the county Board of Supervisors remains committed to building a massive international airport at El Toro. Thankfully, others in the pro-airport camp are more rational.
Enter Tom Edwards, a former Newport Beach mayor, longtime El Toro International Airport advocate, and the current chairman of the El Toro Citizens Advisory Commission. Edwards has put forth a bold—dare we say brilliant?—plan to stop the madness surrounding El Toro: end all planning for an El Toro International Airport, prohibit further expansion of John Wayne Airport, and use other regional airports to pick up future aviation demand.
Of course, the plan is nothing new to Weekly readers—we first advocated it two years ago. The plan appeared in a speech we had written for 3rd District Supervisor Todd Spitzer and published on June 5, 1998. He never gave the speech, which means what could have been forever known as the "Spitzer Plan" may now achieve fame as the "Edwards Plan."
Keep in mind that Edwards’ sudden interest in real diplomacy comes after years of ridiculing such a move. When South County city officials opposed to the airport sent a letter to Newport Beach residents offering information on the non-aviation El Toro reuse plan and urging cooperation, Edwards called the offer "baloney" and described the letter as a "cynical attempt to apply pressure to Newport Beach."
That’s because Edwards’ original strategy for keeping John Wayne Airport contained centered on dumping all future aviation into El Toro. After all, he’s one of the founding members of the Newport Beach-based Airport Working Group, whose original charter—prevent John Wayne Airport expansion—changed in the mid-1990s to rabid El Toro boosterism. In addition, Edwards acted as one of the attorneys suing in late 1999 to get Measure F tossed off the ballot.
But Measure F stayed on the ballot and won with a stunning 67 percent of the vote. El Toro’s future, once bright and clear to people like Edwards, now looks like the skies over LAX. That was Edwards’ rationale for admitting there might be other options for preventing further expansion of John Wayne Airport than merely building a second, mightier airport.
If more pro-El Toro activists like Edwards come forward, maybe the three pro-airport county supervisors will finally open their eyes.
We Win
El Toro Airport Watch No. 137
by Anthony Pignataro, March 7, 2000
The el toro international airport is dead, put to rest March 7 by Orange County residents who voted overwhelmingly for Measure F.
For regular readers of this column, Measure F’s victory is no surprise. We’ve been reporting on the county’s plans for El Toro since Jan. 24, 1997. Just about each week since then, we’ve detailed some misleading, incorrect or simply ludicrous aspect of the county’s plan to build a massive international airport—the nation’s fifth largest—in the middle of some of the most densely populated real estate in the western United States. Even with two daily newspaper competitors, fresh weekly evidence of the county’s arrogance, stupidity and duplicity was never hard to find.
Our decision to openly oppose the county’s plans for El Toro was simple: destroying communities is not open to question. If there were two sides on the El Toro issue, they were these: the right one and the county’s.
The county’s proposed El Toro International Airport was, from its very beginning, deeply flawed and downright cynical. From the start, county environmental-impact reports attempted to discount the damage a large international airport would wreak on South County cities. These same studies and reports overestimated aviation demand and economic benefits, to say nothing of popular support.
Through it all, the actions of the pro-airport county supervisors—Cynthia Coad, Jim Silva and Chuck Smith—personified fecklessness. They oversaw a planning process shrouded in secrecy. County officials routinely suppressed key planning documents. The supes’ opposition to televising board meetings made them seem frightened of the idea that more than 50 people might see them rubber-stamping a process marked by delays, contradictions, outright lies and monumental cost overruns.
When Measure F—the citizens’ effort to kill El Toro—first came before them in February 1999, the supervisors’ response was typical: they ignored it. When anti-airport activists went on to gather more than 220,000 signatures for Measure F, the pro-airport supes panicked and endorsed a propaganda program designed to suggest that Measure F would lead directly to the liberation of dangerous criminals onto our streets.
That’s why passage of Measure F by a two-thirds margin—the highest of any previous El Toro ballot initiative—was so meaningful. Measure F could not have been passed by South County residents alone. Tens of thousands of people beyond El Toro’s flight paths sided with those whose homes were in what had come to be called, in the haunting language of airport planning, El Toro’s "noise print." The people of North County heard El Toro’s boosters promise new jobs, less pollution and a booming economy if El Toro is built; they read the mailers featuring hardened convicts; and then the voters of North County told the supervisors to drop dead.
Measure F’s huge margin of victory isn’t a mere "bump in the road," as one airport booster put it. It’s a complete and total rejection of the county’s paranoid, inept planning process.
But don’t expect immediate change. Airport boosters could barely conceal their eagerness to fight the measure in court. Smith vowed election night to put a new measure overturning Measure F on the ballot in November.
We dare him to do it. Voting data shows that he would face voter antipathy in every city but Newport Beach and Costa Mesa, which border John Wayne Airport. Residents in those cities are now justly terrified of the future. That’s not a surprise: in order to guarantee the support of Costa Mesa and Newport Beach voters in their campaign for El Toro, airport boosters led by superdeveloper George Argyros spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on hysterical mailers warning residents in those cities that Measure F’s passage would bring on cataclysmic expansion of John Wayne Airport.
It’s now up to the South County residents who created Measure F to reach out to Newport Beach and Costa Mesa and promise to stand with citizens there in the battle to keep the lid on John Wayne Airport.
Ironically, people who live around John Wayne Airport will now have a powerful tool in that fight—Measure F; just as ironically, their own elected officials may become leaders in the campaign to undo Measure F in the courts.
For our part, we’ll oppose any effort by the county to expand John Wayne Airport. We will continue to oppose the proposed El Toro International Airport for as long as the county continues to plan one. For that matter, we will continue to oppose the county (or any city) in attempts to build a Wal-Mart or prisons or weapons disposal yards or any other noxious use in a neighborhood where the residents oppose it.
Measure F was occasionally criticized as a manifestation of narrow, not-in-my-back-yard politics. We’d say there’s nothing wrong with such provincialism; one of the best features of political conservatism is its emphasis on protecting what’s yours. We trust that South County residents will support others throughout the county who, in voting for Measure F, said, "Not in anyone’s back yard."
50 Reasons to Hate the Proposed El Toro International Airport
1 If SoCal really needs a big, new airport, old March Air Force Base in Riverside County, now open for commercial flights and 25 air miles from El Toro, sports a 13,300-foot runway—the longest in California.
2 On Nov. 20, 1997, county executive officer Jan Mittermeier told the solidly pro-airport Orange County Business Council that "96 percent of Orange County cargo is transported through airports other than [John Wayne Airport], which, according to Chapman University president and economist James Doti, is the equivalent of $4.9 billion in lost annual revenue." That sounds great, except Doti denies he or anyone at Chapman ever came up with that figure. In fact, no one seems to know where Mittermeier found such a precise figure. Unless she made it up.
3 At 1:44 a.m. on June 25, 1965, a U.S. Air Force C-135 (the equivalent of a Boeing 707) crashed into Loma Ridge nine minutes after departing north on El Toro’s Runway 34. Aboard were the plane’s 12 crew members and 72 Marines headed for Vietnam. All were killed. After the crash, all big transport aircraft were directed to depart El Toro to the south on Runway 16. Today, the county wants 38 percent of all departures to head north on Runway 34.
4 The county wants El Toro’s eastern-facing Runway 7 to launch 62 percent of all departures. This is despite the fact that Runway 7 is the worst of all of El Toro’s runways, since it forces aircraft to depart uphill into rising terrain with tail winds—a hat trick of trouble commercial pilots usually try to avoid.
5 In order to scare the hell out of Newport Beach and make sure its residents continue to support a massive international airport at El Toro, county planners came up with Plan G. If El Toro doesn’t get the go-ahead, Plan G would kick in: John Wayne Airport gets a few additional thousand feet of runway, huge swaths of commercial land around the field get swallowed up (including the corporate park that houses OC Weekly World Headquarters), and 25 million passengers fly in and out of the terminal every year to points around the globe. Ironically, anti-airport supervisors have tried to kill Plan G; not so surprisingly, pro-airport supervisors have successfully voted to keep it alive. What’s even scarier is that many Newport Beach residents might actually believe the county would blast their city off the map with this monster.
6 Two words: baggage claim.
7 Because El Toro would open in the middle of one of the largest concentrations of airports in the world, it would hurl 150 planes into already-existing flight paths every day.
8 Commercial airliners and airports are the biggest unregulated sources of air pollution in the world. Airports typically emit more nitrogen oxides and volatile organics (what you and I call smog) than most power plants and industrial centers. According to a 1996 Natural Resources Defense Council report on airliner pollution, "If the relationship between airplanes, airports and air pollution is not thoroughly re-examined, [the predicted] increase in flights will undoubtedly lead to a continued increase in uncontrolled, local air pollution."
9 Despite county officials’ assurances that they’d work to get nighttime curfews at El Toro, no such restrictions appear in the El Toro Airport System Master Plan. Instead, planners proposed voluntary, non-binding agreements with each airline, limiting the flights of aircraft during late-night and early morning hours. Since the Federal Aviation Administration isn’t involved with these agreements, it’s unclear how many—if any—airlines will go for this scheme.
10 No commercial airlines have expressed any interest to the county in either moving their operations from John Wayne Airport or opening additional, redundant gates at El Toro.
11 County El Toro spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Tom Wall (USMC, Retired). Paid $5,000 per month to speak to civic groups on the county’s plans for El Toro, Wall is also executive director of the Newport Beach-based pro-airport group Orange County Airport Alliance. Wall, who flew helicopters in the Marines and has never logged a single hour in a commercial airliner (except, we presume, as a passenger), likes to tell crowds that El Toro "is in fact an international airport today." When faced with questions about commercial pilots’ unions criticizing El Toro’s eastern-facing Runway 7 for its nearly constant tail winds, Wall typically responds with the authority of one who would know that "wind direction is not even an issue when talking about today’s commercial airliners."
12 The county’s June 4 and 5, 1999, series of demonstration flights in and out of El Toro designed to "calm the fears" of residents worried that a future El Toro International Airport would destroy their quality of life actually did nothing of the sort. In fact, the tests were bogus from the outset, producing "no usable data," as then-El Toro program manager Courtney Wiercioch acknowledged afterward. Residents still rose up in indignation, even though the test planes were lightly loaded and flew along special flight tracks and used departure procedures that significantly cut their noise.
13 We have no real affection for 5th District Supervisor Tom Wilson—his relationship with Don Bren’s Irvine Co. is a little too cozy for our tastes—but his getting passed over for chairman of the board twice is ridiculous. What makes the three pro-airport supervisors on the board so terrified of anti-airport Wilson sitting in the center seat? Is their hold over the airport planning process that tenuous?
14 In a June 14, 1999, letter to El Toro Airport Info Web site editor Len Kranser, American Airlines vice president Robert W. Baker wrote that his company disagreed strongly with the county’s reliance on infamous Runway 7, noting that "Runway 7 with a tail wind component and rising terrain will never be considered desirable or preferable from an airline or pilot’s point of view" and predicted that "you can fully expect most pilots to reject an offer of Runway 7," potentially throwing the county’s "preferred runway" plan for El Toro into chaos.
15 Twenty-seven years ago, the all-powerful Irvine Co.—which now pretends to be neutral on the El Toro issue—found the prospect of a massive commercial airport on the Irvine doorstep too awful to contemplate: "Civilian or dual use of either or both the two Marine Corps air facilities shall be opposed for reasons of safety and environmental compatibility," wrote Irvine Co. vice president for planning Richard A. Reese in an Oct. 5, 1972, letter to the Orange County Planning Commission. "It shall be a policy to cooperate in the planning of systems which provide ground-transportation linkages to air-transportation facilities."
16 A 1980 noise study of neighborhoods near LAX conducted by UC Irvine social ecology professor Dan Stokols shows that children in El Segundo and Inglewood schools under that airport’s flight path experienced higher stress than children in quieter schools. "Blood pressure in children went up after initial exposure to the noise but then stabilized after prolonged exposure," said Stokols in 1997. "Adrenaline secretions went up, too, but didn’t stabilize."
17 First, way back in August 1996, county officials said a truly massive, 38 million-annual-passenger airport would cost just $1.5 billion. That’s it—just about the amount of money blown in the 1994 county bankruptcy. Then, for a long time, county officials stopped talking about cost. When Christmas 1999 finally came around, county officials rolled out a new plan—half as big as the 1996 proposal but costing twice as much.
18 On Oct. 26, 1999, a week after voting to extend the contracts of three county El Toro planning managers, chairman of the Board of Supervisors Chuck Smith attended a $250-per-head fund-raiser at George Argyros’ Arnel Development offices. Also in attendance were three pro-airport Newport Beach City Council members, Argyros mouthpiece and former 3rd District Supervisor Bruce Nestande, big-time Newport Beach city lobbyist Lyle Overby, and Argyros PR consultants Dave Ellis and Scott Hart.
19 "[W]e may eventually be stuck with an airport layout that, while it looks great by itself on paper, is virtually unusable from an integrated [air-traffic-control] standpoint," wrote FAA official Walter White in an Aug. 4, 1999, office e-mail concerning El Toro. "I do not look forward to the years of safety problems and litigation we might undergo as we work to fix a bad initial plan. Many of the plans reviewed to date have significant problems."
20 The county plans to place El Toro’s 11-acre fuel-tank farm—eight massive tanks holding 14 million gallons of highly combustible jet fuel—near the railroad tracks along the base’s southern edge. That’s a mere 1,000 feet from Technology Drive, home to many of the high-tech firms that make up the Irvine Spectrum.
21 The county’s great 770-acre regional park that wraps around El Toro’s eastern-perimeter crash zones, which county officials advertised as opening in 2003, is actually one of the lowest construction priorities at the base. It won’t open until sometime after 2015, according to the Airport System Master Plan’s construction schedule. But the base’s two golf courses will open by 2005, showing the county’s true priorities when it comes to planting grass.
22 Considering all the hype surrounding El Toro’s economic benefits to the county, county planners estimate the new airport will create just 32,000 jobs and $3 billion in economic output over the next 20 years —exactly what it costs to build.
23 In 1998, 3.5 percent fewer passengers used John Wayne Airport than the previous year. In fact, 20 of the 25 months between October 1997 and November 1999 showed lower passenger use at John Wayne Airport than during the same month in the previous year. Passenger demand is only now climbing to 1997 levels. Clearly, John Wayne Airport is stagnating at roughly 7 million passengers per year. Where is the "rising demand" county officials trumpet when explaining the need for a massive international airport at El Toro?
24 The county’s "turnkey" El Toro International Airport is actually a construction job of Hoover Dam proportions. Because the county wants to reshape the base’s slope, it will have to add 5.9 million cubic yards of dirt to the base’s northwestern and southwestern quadrants. To put that into perspective, the famous Colorado River dam contains only 4.5 million cubic yards of concrete. Bringing the dirt to the base will be a job in itself:it will require 30,000 railcars, which, if linked in one train, would stretch 340 miles.
25 The county has already wasted more than $40 million planning five different airport proposals—none of which will work.
26 Old Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino is 45 air miles from El Toro and is open for commercial flights.
27 "More than enough safety issues have surfaced out of the county’s proposed El Toro airport configuration and proposed operations that we think that the best interests of the flying public are not being taken into account," wrote former FAA associate administrator Don Segner in an Oct. 31, 1997, letter to FAA director Jane Garvey. "The people of Orange County need to know what the noise and environmental impacts will be. Lack of information as to the real noise impacts is misleading many buyers and developers."
28 To promote their vaunted airport, county PR flacks have spun some of the emptiest promises we’ve seen since the bankruptcy. Did you know that "our continued prosperity depends on our ability to become a full-fledged member of the global community"? Or that the proposed airport will "help the economy soar" and "lift the spirits of recreation-minded residents"? Even if the county gets its way, the airport won’t open until 2005—but can we have those airsick bags now?
29 Chronic exposure to jet noise is dangerous. According to Arline Bronzaft, a noise specialist at the City University of New York, listening to airplanes day and night can raise blood pressure and cause psychiatric disorders. In addition, a 1995 study by Barbara Luke at the University of Michigan concluded that sustained noise can stimulate stress hormones in pregnant women, leading to premature contractions.
30 Residents around El Toro will hear 80 to 90 decibels from every airplane landing and taking off. That’s really loud. But the county insists that nearby residents "will experience little or no noise." That’s because state law only requires them to analyze noise averaged over a 24-hour period, as opposed to single-event noise—imagine the sounds of a car crash in your living room averaged out over the course of the day. The result, of course, is that the county benefits from mishandled newspaper accounts saying residents will only have to face 65 decibels of noise from the airport.
31 Page 1-6 of the county’s 10,000-page Draft Environmental Impact Report lists unresolved issues surrounding El Toro. The most important: "Method of delivering aviation fuel to El Toro for the project." In other words, the county is about to start building a $3 billion airport, and their planners have no clue how they’re going to get 14 million gallons of jet fuel to that massive tank farm they spent so much time and money designing.
32 Sleek, modern airports like Denver International typically pop up in flat, empty areas far away from population centers and inconvenient terrain. El Toro is an exception: not only do hundreds of thousands of people live within a couple of miles of its tarmac, but hills also surround the base on three sides. Only the base’s western edge lacks rising terrain, but county officials say no aircraft will take off in that direction—doing so would hurl planes directly at John Wayne Airport.
33 The nation’s two largest commercial pilots’ unions, the Air Line Pilots Association and the Allied Pilots Association—which between them represent thousands of pilots —oppose the county’s proposed El Toro runway layout. Their reasons: El Toro’s runways slope upward into rising terrain, making engine-out procedures (when an aircraft loses an engine while taking off) tricky and scary.
34 In April 1998, the aviation firm Jeppesen Sanderson handed its two-volume Jeppesen Analyses report on El Toro to the county. That report, containing hundreds of pages of tables detailing departure weights for every conceivable airliner under every conceivable temperature situation, proves that El Toro’s eastern-facing Runway 7 —slated to handle 62 percent of all departures—forces significant weight penalties on all aircraft. The report also makes clear these penalties don’t exist on other runways. County officials’ continued insistence that there is absolutely nothing wrong with Runway 7 has led many critics to wonder whether they are stupid or just plain dishonest.
35 For an airport slated to move 2.2 million tons of cargo every year by 2020, it’s too bad air cargo companies couldn’t care less about El Toro. "UPS is very pleased with its operations at John Wayne Airport," wrote an official from that company to the county on Jan. 18, 1999. When Airborne Express submitted its interim cargo plan for El Toro, it called for a mere 10 operations per week—four of which would require only a single-engine prop plane. Even Federal Express, which supports an airport at El Toro, called for only a dozen operations per week. Of course, interim cargo at El Toro is now dead, but it’s doubtful any of these companies care.
36 "I really doubt that those runways as they are will be your runways," said Mary Schiavo, former federal Department of Transportation inspector general, on Oct. 1, 1998. "They will have to be rotated." In other words, the runways point in the wrong directions and ideally would run parallel to the 5 freeway. Schiavo, a nationally recognized authority on airport and airline safety, also predicted that because John Wayne Airport is just seven miles from El Toro, it would close once El Toro opens.
37 County officials like to say that, unless you live in a zone exposed to 65 decibels of noise averaged over 24 hours (called 65 CNEL), you won’t hear anything from El Toro. Yet this completely contradicts evidence from John Wayne Airport, where the residents who complain the most about airplane noise to that airport’s noise office live in Balboa and Corona del Mar—four miles from the John Wayne CNEL zone. For the hundreds of thousands of residents who live similar distances from El Toro, good luck.
38 "People ask, ‘Where are people that are on welfare right now going to find jobs?’" said 2nd District Supervisor, airport booster and New Voice of the Downtrodden Jim Silva on the Feb. 2, 1998, episode of KOCE’s Real Orange news program. "Well, there are a lot of low-skill jobs with every airport that will take care of a lot of communities that have a lot of people who have a hard time getting jobs."
39 For all the county’s talk about building a giant park at El Toro, the FAA generally frowns on planting big trees and filling deep ponds mere yards from the runways. The reason: birds. It’s too easy for small birds to get sucked into big jet turbines at inopportune moments like landings and takeoffs. FAA Advisory Circular 150/5200-33, titled "Hazardous Wildlife Attractants on or Near Airports," makes it clear nothing that attracts birds should sit within 10,000 feet of any runway or taxiway.
40 Megadeveloper, bazillionaire and right-wing political benefactor George Argyros wants it.
41 When taking off, a jumbo jet airliner will devour more than 500,000 gallons of air per second. After five minutes, it has consumed the air produced by 50,000 acres of forest. That same airliner typically spends 32 minutes taxiing on the ground, during which it emits 190 pounds of ozone-depleting nitrogen oxide. By 2020, the airline industry estimates there will be 20,000 such airliners in the skies.
42 The county continues to insist that El Toro is a turnkey operation: open the gates and let the airlines fly in. But according to the 1994 study on El Toro conducted by Kotin, Regan & Mouchly for the city of Laguna Niguel, El Toro’s runways, hangars and air-traffic-control center are all outdated and useless for a commercial airport. In addition, the report noted that of all Southern California airport sites, El Toro has "the highest potential civilian casualties in the event of an airplane crash due to the extensive residential and commercial development."
43 According to calculations by Albert E. Domke, operational engineering manager for United Airlines, the airline’s Boeing 757s can only take off from El Toro’s Runway 7 with 94.5 percent of their maximum payload under calm conditions and just 76.9 percent when 7-knot tail winds are blowing across the pavement.
44 To clarify such a "technical" issue as noise, county officials hauled out noise consultant Vince Mestre for an April 7, 1998, "educational" briefing for the county Board of Supervisors. During his presentation, Mestre offered such insights as "There is a relationship between noise exposure and the population that is affected by noise" and "Studies of human response to noise have shown that human response to noise is very complex." Needless to say, the only noise heard during the board meeting was snoring.
45 Page 6-9 of the county’s Airport System Master Plan shows how all four El Toro runways are completely useless and have to go. During construction Phase 1, "the existing 10,000-foot Runway 16R/ 34L will be reconstructed." Phase 2 will see that runway extended a half-mile, as well as the construction of "a new Runway 16L/ 34R." Runway 7R/25L will also have to be "reconstructed." Nothing will happen in Phase 3, but Phase 4 "calls for the construction of a new Runway 7L/25R."
46 The county calls El Toro a "midsize" airport. But the Airport System Master Plan says that in 2020, there will be 412 arrivals and 412 departures every day—824 operations in all. That works out to an average of one operation every two minutes. All day and all night. Sleep tight.
47 Los Angeles International Airport sucked an average of 27.4 percent from the property values of homes surrounding that airport, according to a study by licensed real-estate appraiser Randall Bell. The same study also shows commercial office buildings directly under the LAX flight path along Century Boulevard have a 38.1 percent vacancy rate—17 percent higher than comparable buildings just a couple of miles away.
48 Old George Air Force Base in Victorville is 60 air miles from El Toro and also open for commercial flights.
49 Sometimes, county officials’ giddy anticipation of flying hundreds of thousands of planes into El Toro every year gets to them. According to Page 3-3 of the county’s 1998 Working Paper 3—JWA/OCA Simulation Assumptions report, El Toro International Airport’s "terminal building will have an infinite number of gates to accommodate all aircraft." In addition, "a similar gate with infinite capacity will be created at the airport for general aviation aircraft and for cargo operations." We’d like to say that’s a lot of people, but we can’t count to infinity.
50 Although county officials like to say that their proposed El Toro International Airport will actually make air quality better here than if nothing is built (stop laughing), Page 4.5-5 of the DEIR says different. A section called "Project Impacts on Regional Air Quality" makes clear that El Toro "would result in exceedances [sic] of all criteria pollutants (CO, NOx, ROC and particulate matter [PM10]). Three of these increases (CO, NOx and PM10) would exceed the operational thresholds established by the [Southern California Air Quality Management District]."
Labor's Big Day
El Toro Airport Watch No. 131
by Mick Schou, January 20, 2000
Last week’s high-profile vote of the Board of Supervisors couldn’t have been sweeter for organized labor even if Eugene V. Debs, Walter Reuther and Joe Hill themselves had cast the winning votes.
The supervisors voted 3-2 to sign a so-called "Project Labor Agreement" (PLA) with the Los Angeles/Orange County Building and Construction Trades Council, AFL-CIO. The end result of this vote: every major construction project for the next five years will be built by union workers.
To most local observers, including the virulently anti-union editorial writers at The Orange County Register, however, the supes’ vote was merely a cynical bid to guarantee labor’s support for the county’s controversial plan to build a commercial airport at the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. That much is obvious; the pro-airport trio that carried the vote—Supes Chuck Smith, Jim Silva and Cynthia Coad—are hardly friends of labor. Their sudden conversion to the union cause can only be understood in the context of the airport battle.
But these facts ignore the real significance of the Jan. 11 vote: for perhaps the first time in Orange County history, organized labor won a major victory from the county’s most powerful politicians in return for what can only be described as nothing. Orange County labor has always supported a commercial airport at El Toro, chiefly because of the project’s potential to create thousands of well-paying—if short-term—union construction jobs.
Labor’s support for the airport hasn’t just been ideological: labor dollars and union voters helped pass the pro-airport Measure A and defeat the anti-airport Measure S—something labor has never tried to hide.
"No one else is reaching out to labor unions by offering us a valuable alternative to what’s been proposed by the county," said Bill Fogarty, secretary/treasurer of the OC Central Labor Council (CLC). "It’s hard to say no to jobs for our members, whether the project is an airport or not."
One thing the county can likely expect in return from the CLC is that it won’t support Measure F, the anti-airport Safe & Healthy Communities Act scheduled for a vote on March 7. As Fogarty knows, Measure F would make it difficult—if not impossible—for the county to proceed with the kinds of major public-works projects typically rich in union jobs.
Still, he insists no promises have been made. "Our delegates are still waiting to make a decision about Measure F," said Fogarty. "Some of them live in South County and oppose the airport. But that issue will come to our executive board and then go to our membership for a vote. What the membership decides is what our council will endorse, and that is based on a simple majority"—not the two-thirds "supermajority" vote promulgated by Measure F.
Whatever the outcome of Measure F, labor’s new deal with the county in no way depends on the future of the El Toro International Airport. "This agreement has nothing to do with the airport," claimed Mike Potts, a business representative with the LA/OC Building Trades who also sits on the pro-airport El Toro Citizens Advisory Commission. "If the county doesn’t get its airport, we still have an agreement."
In fact, an appendix to the PLA lists approximately 100 potential county contracts that would be handed over to union workers as part of the deal. While both union and nonunion contractors would have the right to bid on all of those projects, nonunion contractors would have to hire 85 percent of their employees for the project directly from local union hiring halls.
"The crux of this agreement is that the county of Orange has always paid a certain wage that is based on the prevailing wage," said Potts. "In the past several years, Orange County’s nonunion culture has eroded that wage by underbidding unionized contractors who have no ability to compete with nonunion contractors who illegally reduce wages. This new agreement won’t allow for that. It just won’t be possible."
While the PLA will only cover construction jobs—and not any long-term employment opportunities created by a major public-works project such as an airport—Orange County labor can be expected to fight for those jobs further down the road, when projects like the airport actually come to fruition. Fogarty told the Weekly that the CLC is in the process of presenting various local officials with proposed "neutrality agreements" that would keep employers from interfering with organizing efforts.
"Whatever is built—an airport, a jail, a dump or whatever—we want to make sure that there are certain protections for those long-term job positions that are created," Fogarty said. "Federal law says that employers should remain neutral in employee decisions over labor representation. If there is an opportunity to organize those workers, we want to make sure that employers obey the law and allow the workers to organize if they so choose."
Che Argyros
El Toro Airport Watch No. 126
by Anthony Pignataro, January 6, 2000George Argyros is many things: major land developer, political high roller, big-time check-writer. He has cozied up to presidents and chaired hundreds of fund-raisers, all for pols who mirror his right-wing beliefs. He spent $2 million of his own, hard-earned money on two El Toro International Airport ballot campaigns.
Now, thanks to The New York Times, we know the 62-year-old fund-raising chairman of the California GOP is also a friend of the working man.
In a Dec. 27 story on the fight over the proposed El Toro International Airport, Argyros - who normally disdains talking to the OC press corps - offered the Times an assessment of the fight that would boil Che Guevara's blood.
"It’s a classic case of class warfare to me," Argyros told Times reporter James Sterngold. "The South County is all spanking-new, and they live behind their guarded gates. It’s almost the working people of the North against the haves in the South."
This is a side of Argyros we haven’t seen before. If we were cynical, we’d say Argyros was merely needling the airport opposition by aligning himself—a near-billionaire megadeveloper—with predominantly working-class northern cities as well as perpetuating the sham view that an airport at El Toro would provide long-term benefits to labor unions.
Argyros the revolutionary lives in a $4.5 million estate (he owns others, but those are for his children and special occasions) on the end of tiny Harbor Island in Newport Bay. Access to the island is strictly controlled and limited to a single-lane, gated bridge. Signs warn away the unwanted. Argyros and the island’s other 27 residents lease the formerly public beach that surrounds the island under a special deal pushed through Sacramento a decade ago.
Then again, it’s possible Argyros just feels guilty about all the times he’s screwed the working man. Perhaps he’s never gotten over the 1988 pieces written by then-Orange County Register columnist Bob Emmers on Argyros’ habit of parking his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce in either the handicapped space or loading zone of his Arnel Development offices. He doesn’t do that anymore—not since he had the loading zone repainted into his own private "reserved" parking space.
Or maybe last November’s Superior Court award of $1.75 million in damages from construction defects to 24 homes in Yorba Linda’s Brighton Estates tract, built by Argyros in the late 1980s, still bothers him. Argyros built only seven neighborhoods of single-family homes in his development career, but 260 residents have so far sued Argyros for damages stemming from allegedly shoddy construction.
Watch for future Argyros agitations on the high cost of living ("What this country needs is a good 5-cent cigar"), job security ("Be happy in your work") and the availability of health care for everyone ("Doctor, it hurts when I do this").
Click here for past articles in this series: 1997 1998 1999
