Wilsonian Democracy
COUNTY SUPERVISOR TOM WILSON LAST WEEK STEPPED UP NEWPORT Beach’s push to have restrictions on John Wayne Airport extended for another 20 years when the current night curfew and flight limits end in 2005.
Wilson’s position, therefore, is no flights at El Toro, and no more flights at John Wayne.
As Wilson represents the people who live closest to John Wayne and El Toro, his advocacy of no more flights, no way, no how, nowhere in Orange County, can be excused as political expediency. The bigger problem is that this Wilsonian approach to air transportation issues appears to increasingly reflect the county consensus.
Now, there is fairness to the idea of extending the John Wayne agreement.
The area around John Wayne has thrived in recent years both commercially and residentially, serving as a reality check to those who argue that only bad things can come from an airport. Rapidly appreciating multi-million dollar homes, top-notch schools, glitzy shopping centers and high-tech businesses appear to be undeterred by noisy jets that come closer to civilization than would any commercial planes at El Toro.
On the other hand, there’s unfairness in asking the community around John Wayne to accept even more flights while a sprawling former Marine base sits empty a few miles away. Eliminating curfews and packing more flights into John Wayne wouldn’t be a long-term solution anyway: At the risk of upsetting the existing “ecological” balance, the county would only be increasing the airport’s capacity by about 50%, or about four million annual passengers.
There is an alternative idea for John Wayne which has been floated by a few South County partisans and is one of the county’s official options: It calls for bulldozing businesses, tearing up roads and a freeway and changing the entire character of a community in order to shoe-horn an airport twice the size of the existing John Wayne into the heavily populated area.
This would, of course, be folly. To spend billions of dollars and to disrupt lives and businesses in order to add air-flight capacity that could be accommodated at El Toro for next to nothing would be a public policy boondoggle of a greater magnitude than Bob Citron’s investments.
The sheer weight of logic and of potential endless litigation should prevent a major John Wayne expansion from ever happening.
So where do we go? While there are those in Newport Beach who continue to think that the best way to assure limits at John Wayne is to ramp up El Toro, desperation may be setting in. An alliance of Newport Beach hold-the-liners and South County NIMBYs could ensure that John Wayne never grows, and that El Toro never happens.
If that’s what Orange County wants, that’s what it will get. But let’s acknowledge the consequences, which will include ever costlier and more inconvenient air travel.
No way around it
A Smaller El Toro
WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GEORGE ARGYROS’ POSITION ON AN EL Toro airport and my own?
Three million dollars. Other than that, not much.
And I agree with his call last week for halving the proposed airport to roughly 14 million passengers a year, and leaving it well into the future for other boards of supervisors and electorates to decide whether to grow the airport.
A smaller, gentler El Toro is one of the four points I’ve been recommending as a way to turn the airport project into a win-win undertaking.
Unfortunately, the proposal is probably too little, too late to win any support from the airport opposition. They’re riding high, and figure they can kill the airport permanently at the ballot box in the next year or two.
Still, on the assumption that it ain’t over till it’s over, a smaller airport is the way to go.
