CURRENT NEWS
Sunday, April 1, 2001
Engineering
Consent
Millions
for PR, but Airport Questions Remain
A few million dollars here and a few million there, and the war for the
hearts and
minds of Orange
County citizens on both sides of the El Toro airport debate has
turned out to be
a very expensive proposition. It is incredible that after eight years of
civil war all this
money has been spent, with more in the pipeline, without any
reliable sense
that the proposed airport is likely to operate as advertised.
The lifting of Measure F's restriction on airport spending has been a factor
in
unleashing a new
round of authorized expenditures for public relations and lobbying
on the pro-airport
side. On the anti-airport side, an established pattern of spending to
defeat the proposal
simply has been affirmed by the same court ruling, which struck
down the March
2000 ballot initiative. The decision on the anti-airport initiative by
a
Los Angeles judge
renewed the perception in communities surrounding the base that
money spent to
defeat the El Toro airport was a good public investment in
protecting the
area's quality of life.
For county airport planners, even before the short period of Measure F's
restrictions, the
availability of airport revenues from John Wayne Airport to finance
the planning and
public relations work for El Toro long was a way to soften
criticism. There
was no direct diversion of funds from other county purposes to
finance a project
lacking a firm base of public support. Having John Wayne revenue
available has been
a powerful incentive for designing a two-airport plan--the plan
might have looked
completely different were it not for the need to use these John
Wayne aviation
funds at El Toro.
Since 1995, the county has spent nearly $35 million in this manner to plan
a new
airport. A few
holes turned up recently in the argument that the spending was
painless, however,
when the director of John Wayne said that the continued use of
funds for El Toro
could result in new fees to passengers and other clients at the
airport.
This warning came at about the same time that the county said it would
be
spending another
$5 million over the next 15 months on a public information
campaign to promote
the county's plan. The funding is to be handled by the Orange
County Regional
Airport Authority, a 13-city coalition. This authorization was
justified as a
way to counter the millions being spent on the other side. Indeed, the
money being spent
by South County cities to fight the airport war has dwarfed
county spending
on promotion, especially recently.
For the South County cities, money to defeat El Toro and funding authorized
in
Irvine last spring
to promote a "great park" at the former Marine base have been
seen as a way to
turn the tide and then begin making the case for an alternative.
Irvine's recent
assumption of the lead role in a proposed ballot initiative for next year
to repeal plans
for an El Toro airport effectively would render moot some of the
money already spent
by the El Toro Reuse Planning Authority. In addition to
campaigning against
an El Toro airport, that eight-city coalition, which includes
Irvine, has promoted
the so-called Millennium Plan, a park with commercial
development and
new homes.
Last month, Newport Beach joined the fray with its own allocation of $3.69
million to promote
the approval of an El Toro airport, arguing that John Wayne has
done its share.
With all these millions being spent, the problem still lies with getting
a realistic
and forthright
airport proposal. One could argue that money to promote an airport
plan, or at least
debate its merits, would be well spent if the plan didn't have the
nation's pilots
concerned on safety grounds and the airlines opposed to operating out
of two airports.
Instead of addressing these concerns directly, the county has complained
that
such opposition
serves only to pressure the county to change its proposed airport
operations. Well,
isn't that the point of having the experts weigh in: to give them
some influence
on the final project?
At the same time, the county argues that it needs to spend more money to
get
"the facts" about
its airport proposal out. What it is saying really is that legitimate
questions about
safety and economic feasibility raised by the experts are
counterproductive.
A believable plan could be a basis for discussion. The effort to silence
important
aviation voices
suggests only that the plan itself is not the product it's cracked up to
be. It does no
good to spend millions on correcting "misinformation" if the facts are
in doubt.
No wonder both the South County cities and Newport Beach, each with
completely different
stakes in the outcome of the El Toro fight, are making it
municipal priority
to argue their own case. But it's costing them big money.