Doing their homework on El Toro

Jasmine Lee

Both sides of the El Toro airport fight are gearing up to attend a public

meeting this month by catching up on their reading of the massive and

highly technical environment report released two weeks ago.

A public meeting scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Jan. 19 will be the first in a

series of informational sessions designed to explain the environmental

analysis of the proposed El Toro airport and to gather public input, said

John Christensen, a county spokesman.

However, the public has until Feb. 22 to review the report before it goes

to the Board of Supervisors.

Airport opponents have complained that there is not enough time to

thoroughly review the set of documents, which were released Dec. 23.

“We haven’t even gotten all the documents yet. We put in a request to get

the rest of the documents or to extend the deadline,” said Meg Waters,

spokeswoman for a coalition of eight South County cities that are

fighting the airport.

Christensen said a few people have yet to receive some of the technical

sections of the report, but that complete sets of the environmental

analysis are available for public viewing at many of the county’s

libraries.

Even those who support the El Toro airport have had a late start on their

reading. David Ellis, of the Newport Beach-based Airport Working Group,

said he received his copy this week and just began flipping through the

documents. He and other members of the pro-airport organization will be

devoting a lot of time before the Jan. 19 meeting to scanning the papers.

“We’ll struggle through it together,” he said.

Ellis said that some people have complained in the past that there has

not been enough information about the El Toro airport. There are now

100,000 pages of it, he pointed out.

The report addressed the economic consequences, possible noise problems

and safety concerns of the $2.9-billion project. The county’s plan also

includes guidelines for lowering the passenger loads at John Wayne

Airport if El Toro is approved.

The report also acknowledged that an airport would generate significant

noise in some parts of South County, but concluded that, if El Toro isn’t

built, almost 2,000 nearby homes would require insulation as a result of

a John Wayne expansion.

Former Newport Beach Mayor Tom Edwards, a longtime airport activist, said

that he expected much opposition to the county’s environmental report in

light of the 1,000 pages of complaints received when preliminary reports

were released.

Edwards, the chairman of the county’s El Toro Citizens Advisory

Committee, said the panel is considering holding its own public hearing

to listen to what people have to say about the report. It could be held

on Jan. 19, although scheduling is still tentative, he said.

Edwards said El Toro airport critics should remember that state law

requires the environmental analysis to outline the worst-case scenario in

an effort to cover all possibilities.

But Leonard Kranser, chairman of the Citizens for Safe and Healthy

Communities -- the group that produced the antiairport initiative on the

March 7 ballot -- had a different interpretation of the state’s

environmental laws.

He complained that not only have many people not received a copy of the

entire document, those who had were having difficulty understanding the

specialized technical information.

“The [California Environmental Quality Act] requires that the report be

prepared; it doesn’t require that anybody understand it,” Kranser said.