MAYBE THEY SHOULD RENAME THE MAIN PLAZA ON THE 73 TOLL ROAD
“Check-Point Charlie.”
Joking aside, one of the most ominous clouds on Orange County’s new-year horizon is the growing acrimony between “North” and “South” over the proposed El Toro airport. With both sides swinging into high gear for the campaign on the anti-airport Safe & Healthy Communities Initiative, the invective will only intensify in the coming weeks. This growing split threatens to complicate cooperation on countywide and regional issues, and could even spur a secession movement in the South.
The loudest and angriest voices in the airport debate have come from the foes, but the pro-airport side is stepping up its war of words, too. You’ll be hearing a lot in the coming weeks about how the initiative would mean a bigger John Wayne encroaching on and uprooting homes and businesses in Newport and (yes!) Irvine, and how it will mean expanded jail facilities in North County to placate pristine South County.
The anti-airport side felt a little of the sting already last week, in a Dec. 27 New York Times story, “Plans for Military Base Divide California County.” Reporter James Sterngold quoted airport champion George Argyros this way: “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.”
There’s irony, to be sure, in wealthy developer Argyros casting the debate, as Sterngold observed, “in neo-Marxist terms,” or in Newport Beach residents wary of a John Wayne expansion disparaging South County residents as “WASPs.” But you get as you give.
If only both sides would lower the rhetoric a few notches and stipulate to the following: that Orange County can survive economically if the El Toro airport loses, and that South County will remain a desirable place to live if the El Toro airport wins.
But fat chance. You know what they say the first casualty of war is.
, Rick Reiff
