$700,000 Federal Grant to Aid in El Toro Base Reuse Planning

After nearly a year’s delay, the Defense Department is sending Orange County officials more than $700,000 to chart the redevelopment of the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

The long-awaited federal grant is expected to pay for most of the conversion planning for the 4,700-acre base, which is due to close by 1999.

Supervisor Gaddi H. Vasquez said Wednesday that the grant confirms the Defense Department’s “confidence” in local authorities to lead the base conversion process, long mired in political controversy.

“This is good news,” Vasquez said. “This keeps our planning efforts intact. I think we are where we need to be right now.”

The funds are expected to be forwarded to the local El Toro Reuse Planning Authority, the intergovernmental agency created to produce a conversion plan acceptable to the federal government, which owns the base. Vasquez is vice chairman of that planning agency.

Although local officials said Wednesday that the award had been expected, funding was stalled for almost a year as the county Board of Supervisors and the cities surrounding the base battled for control over base conversion planning.

In the past several months, however, municipal and county leaders have agreed to vest control of the planning process in the newly created intergovernmental authority, which includes members of the Board of Supervisors and the city councils from areas near the base.

“Some people have suggested that the grant may have been threatened because of the delays (in creating the local authority), but I didn’t sense there was a reluctance or hesitation on the part of the federal government to provide the funding,” Vasquez said.

Tony Carstens, the county’s director of policy research and planning, said that the grant is critical to the base planning process and that news of the award “doesn’t surprise us.”

“We were expecting that it would be approved all along,” Carstens said. “In fact, we thought approval might be coming by this week. We’re pleased to hear about it.”

Kenneth H. Bruner, an aide to Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas F. Riley, said that Defense Department officials and members of the local base planning agency had been working together for some time to ensure that “funding would flow” for the base conversion process.

“We were happy with the direction it was going all along,” Bruner said. “We expected that the money was on its way.”

The work of the local base planning agency is continuing, despite discussions of a possible land swap in which the federal government would give the Irvine Co. control of the base in exchange for environmentally sensitive acreage the company owns near the Cleveland National Forest.