The Bell Curve -- Joseph N. Bell

* Editor’s note: A special edition of the Bell Curve appears in

today’s paper as part of our Measure W coverage.

Orange County voters will be asked Tuesday to make a decision for or

against torpedoing an El Toro airport in favor of a park that might be

more accurately described on the ballot as Larry Agran’s Fantasy.

There has been so much written and spoken about this issue that it

might be instructive here to put a face on it. And no face would be more

appropriate than that of Bonnie O’Neil.

Since she moved to Dover Shores in Newport Beach in 1987 and had to

learn to live with the noise of the planes from John Wayne Airport

overhead, Bonnie has been an active, articulate and tireless proponent

for a commercial airport at El Toro and against further expansion of John

Wayne. If Measure W in favor of Agran’s Fantasy wins, no one will be more

frustrated at the result or determined to continue the fight than Bonnie.

And if W loses, no one will be more overjoyed.

Sitting in her living room over brownies and coffee one recent

morning, she retraced for me her lengthy history with this issue. She has

been active in virtually every organization devoted to an El Toro

airport, mostly in the trenches but often leading her own sorties against

the enemy.

“When Orange County agreed to the original expansion of John Wayne,”

she told me, “it also assured Newport Beach that if it went along with

this, the county would seek out a more suitable place to take care of the

further expansion we all knew had to come. That search was well underway

when El Toro dropped into our lap -- an ideal answer. When the voters

supported an El Toro airport in two elections -- the second by a wide

margin -- we were on our way. And that’s when several things began to

happen in South County.

“Politicians discovered that this was an issue they could ride, so

they began to create an atmosphere of fear among the residents that an

airport would destroy their quality of life. City councils jumped on the

bandwagon, and millions of dollars were pumped into a campaign of lies

and exaggeration that kept feeding this fear.”

That’s when El Toro proponents lost the third election. But no one

really knows whether they lost it or not because the airport issue was

paired on Measure F with a requirement for voter approval of sites for

dumps and jails -- a scam engineered by political consultants who took a

healthy bite out of the $40 million or so collected by the South County

folks to squash the airport.

When a Superior Court judge ruled Measure F unconstitutional, the

airport opponents came back with a new scam that would substitute a Great

Park -- which is about as spacey as Agran running for president -- for

the airport. That would be Measure W, which we’ll be voting on Tuesday.

Throughout this whole frustrating process, Bonnie O’Neil has been

addressing meetings anywhere she can convene them to try to counteract

the lies and exaggerations being circulated by the flacks hired to

torpedo the El Toro airport. She would suggest six in particular:

El Toro is unsafe (contrasted with an expanded John Wayne, El Toro

would be a haven of safety); El Toro is being foisted on us by wealthy

Newport Beach developers (South County has raised four times as much

money as airport proponents); trucking gas to El Toro would offer a

dangerous public hazard (gas is piped into El Toro but not into John

Wayne); airport expansion isn’t needed in Orange County (every credible

airport study stresses this need); Newport Beach wants John Wayne closed

(simply not true); noise will be destructive to surrounding communities

(the buffer zone around El Toro is many times greater than the one around

John Wayne, where nearby residents have tolerated the sound level for

many years so South Countians could enjoy a community airport).

There is little question that there have been serious problems with

the efforts to support an El Toro airport. Those efforts have been badly

fragmented among a half-dozen different public and private bodies. They

have been underfunded and not very creative -- too little too late. But

most of all, says Bonnie, they “have lacked a charismatic leader to form

behind.I never got any marching orders.”

So is El Toro a lost cause?

“No way,” says Bonnie. “I think we can beat W. I love Newport Beach,

and I still hope that people will wake up to the damage that will be done

to this beautiful area if we keep our heads in the sand. If we allow this

measure to pass, we will pay -- and so will Orange County -- by being

forced to cope with the disaster of an expanded John Wayne.

“But even if W wins, this fight isn’t over. We have too much to lose

just to give up. Every citizen who will be impacted by the certain

expansion of John Wayne had better get involved. We need leadership, but

we also need people who will speak out and help the volunteers who have

carried for so long this effort to accept the gift that El Toro offers.”

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.