Michael Hiltzik: How to finance a Great Park

Ever since the federal government decommissioned the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station and turned its 3,700 acres over to local control, Orange County and the city of Irvine have made themselves experts in the art of looking a gift horse in the mouth.

As my column for Monday observes, the original proposal to convert the field into a new commercial airport to relieve the stress on LAX and John Wayne Airport was killed by voters, especially local taxpayers uneasy about becoming part of a new flight path. Plan B, to create an ambitious regional park, has generated skepticism over its cost and time frame. The housing crash has complicated matters, as residential development at the fringes of the property was expected to generate the necessary tax revenues to finance the project.

Emile Haddad is on the hot seat today. He's the developer whose homes and commercial developments will have to progress in order to keep Orange County Great Park progressing from drawing board to reality. A look at his experiences and expectations starts here.

The first memory Emile Haddad has of what would become the site of the Orange County Great Park and the location of his biggest development project dates from 1986, not long after he and his family fled their home in Lebanon.

Then it was still the El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, and as he tried to make a phone call from the roadside the quiet was shattered by the sound of an F/A-18 fighter jet screaming overhead.

Haddad, 51, had grown up amid the nearly constant bloodshed of a sectarian Beirut, and his first instinct was to hit the ground. ?I still had the Lebanese mind-set,? he says.

The jet engines have been stilled, but that doesn?t mean the noise level around the site has fallen. Once the Pentagon announced the base would be decommissioned in 1999, surrounding communities started to squabble about how to put its nearly six square miles of Irvine real estate to use.

Four referendums ensued, including two that asked voters to weigh in on plans to turn the base into a commercial airport. The airport idea prevailed in the first vote and died in the second; at that point the plans shifted to the creation of a regional park of about two square miles, surrounded by private development.

Read the whole column.