Disneyland Decides It Doesn’t Need El Toro

A top Disney official said this week that Disneyland doesn’t need an airport at the closed El Toro Marine base to bring more tourists to the Orange County theme park, stunning airport backers who have counted on the company’s support.

In the first public statement by a Disney executive about the proposed airport, Walt Disney Attractions President Paul Pressler said Los Angeles International Airport and improvements to the San Diego and Santa Ana freeways are adequate to serve future tourists.

“We feel the Los Angeles airport will accommodate our needs, particularly with the road expansions that are going on throughout Orange County,” Pressler said Tuesday after remarks to a tourism class at Cal State Fullerton.

His comment shocked El Toro backers.

They counted on Disneyland support to underscore the need for a new airport, which the county envisions will serve up to 28.8 million passengers a year by 2020. The park is the largest tourism-based employer in Orange County with 10,000 workers and expects to hire 5,000 more before opening its second theme park in Anaheim in 2001.

Board of Supervisors Chairman Charles V. Smith, the leading county official backing an El Toro airport, said Pressler was “misinformed” to believe freeways and LAX alone will keep up with air travel demand--especially since a proposal to expand LAX has hit roadblocks from cities near the airport.

“Disneyland is going to be the biggest destination for tourists coming in to El Toro [airport],” Smith said. “Disneyland will get more benefit from El Toro than any other business in Orange County.”

Foes of an El Toro airport lauded Pressler, saying his comment acknowledges that LAX should remain the only sizable international airport in Southern California. Orange County officials have said El Toro, which would be Southern California’s second-largest airport, could serve international destinations, but a large number of flights aren’t expected.

“I applaud him for being honest,” said Susan Withrow, a member of the Mission Viejo City Council and chair of the anti-airport El Toro Reuse Planning Authority. “He ought to convey that to the mayor of Anaheim.”

Disney Was Thought Firmly for El Toro

Disneyland has been viewed as firmly in the pro-El Toro camp because of its key positions on the Anaheim/Orange County Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Orange County Business Council, both of which support the airport as necessary to accommodate tourism growth in the next century.

Three years ago, Disney gave $50,000 to the pro-airport Citizens for Jobs and the Economy to help defeat an anti-airport measure in a countywide election, said Bruce Nestande, the group’s president.

“The fact that Disneyland attracts customers worldwide, and with the increasing congestion on our freeways, the need for El Toro is obvious,” Nestande said Wednesday. “By denying [it needs] El Toro and saying everyone can reach Disneyland on surface streets, they’d just exacerbate the problem.”

Disneyland spokesman Ray Gomez said Wednesday that Pressler’s comments reflect company research.

“We’ve done looks-forward to determine where our guest flows will be and, based on that, we believe LAX is adequate to handle our needs,” Gomez said.

However, he said the company hasn’t taken an official position on whether the new airport at El Toro should be built.

Projections by the Business Council show that nearly 5 million visitors a year to Anaheim and Disneyland will be arriving at area airports by 2010. If El Toro were built, about 2 million people still would fly into LAX, and 2 million would use El Toro, according to a December 1998 council report. The remaining 1 million visitors would use John Wayne Airport.

Anaheim Mayor Tom Daly said Orange County’s $5.7-billion tourism industry has been “loud and clear” on the need for El Toro. Of 38 million tourists to the county in 1998, about 5.4 million were international visitors.

Daly said Pressler’s comment shows that Disney is “aggressively neutral” on the El Toro issue, a position that didn’t surprise the mayor.

“The airport debate is a mess, and they don’t want to take sides,” Daly said.

Many large businesses in Orange County have demurred from taking public stands on El Toro because of the issue’s incredible divisiveness. Most South County residents fervently oppose the airport, while most North County residents support the idea, though with less passion.

The Irvine Co., for example, which owns most of the land around the base, repeatedly has refused to take a position on the airport, saying that it cannot do so until more is known about the final plan.

Disney executives reportedly met a few months ago with pro-airport officials and voiced continued support for El Toro planning efforts. But the executives said they wouldn’t push the plan publicly out of fear of a South County backlash, said one person who attended the meeting but asked to remain anonymous.

Other outspoken executives who have voiced support for the airport were hit with threats of protests and boycotts, including Darrel Anderson, a general partner at Knott’s Berry Farm; Roger Embrey, general manager for the Southern California Gas Co., and Bob Montgomery, senior director of business properties for Southwest Airlines.

After Montgomery’s comments in May, Southwest Chief Executive Herb Kelleher assured anti-airport forces by letter that the company would not interfere with the decision about whether to build the airport.

Disney Says It Has More Pressing Concerns

Walt Disney Co. is more worried about the economy and its need for talented new employees, Pressler said Tuesday at the university, where Disney is co-sponsoring a new undergraduate program in entertainment and tourism.

Before being named president of Walt Disney Attractions last December, Pressler was president of Disneyland, where his chief task was planning Disney’s California Adventure, now under construction next to Disneyland.

Disney is spending $1.4 billion on the new park, a new luxury hotel called the Grand Californian and Downtown Disney, a retail, dining and entertainment zone. It expects to attract 7 million visitors a year at the new park, in addition to about 13 million a year at Disneyland.

To guarantee the expansion’s financial success, Disney persuaded Anaheim and other public entities to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more to upgrade utilities and roadways in the area, including freeway offramps feeding directly into a huge Disney garage.

At a regional tourism conference last week, participants noted that several other new entertainment draws will attract visitors at the same time as the new Disney complex. They include entertainment-oriented areas in Hollywood and Long Beach and an expansion at Knott’s Berry Farm in Buena Park.

The conference, held in Long Beach and attended heavily by Orange County’s travel and tourism businesses, focused on such concerns as educating travelers about the network of rail lines and marketing Southern California as a region, to combat tough competition from Las Vegas and other destinations.

But the conference’s moderator, Jack Kyser, an economist at the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., warned that construction of an airport at El Toro may be a long way off.

Political infighting and likely court battles over El Toro make an airport there “something that probably no one in this room will see in their lifetime,” he said.