One of the county's principal arguments for a massive international airport at El Toro has always been job creation. In making that argument, county officials have floated various and contradictory figures for years, ranging from 20,000 new jobs to 140,000.
Now that the county's long-awaited Airport System Master Plan and Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR) are out, it should be possible to discern a single number—exactly how many jobs we can expect within the confines of El Toro International Airport itself.
In fact, the new numbers differ from all previous numbers and don't even remain consistent from one part of the document to another. Even taking into account the county's inability to follow its own tactical misrepresentations, the numbers still make no sense.
At the Dec. 23, 1999, press conference where the county released the El Toro DEIR and Master Plan, the press release boldly claimed El Toro would create 32,000 jobs. But none of the important-looking job-creation charts in either report contains this number. The Master Plan indicates that El Toro would create 22,700 “aviation-related jobs” and another 3,500 “non-aviation-related jobs”—a total of 26,200 jobs, all based at the airport. That's the number the county cites in its “Economic Benefits Study,” released Nov. 5, 1999. But it's slightly different in the DEIR, which states El Toro would create 26,121 jobs at the airport itself.
No one should be bothered about such a minor internal inconsistency. But both numbers are a far cry from 32,000. Even if you add all jobs created at John Wayne Airport (the county's latest tactic for inflating the job numbers), the number climbs to just 29,500.
And that's just the county's figures for an airport serving 28 million annual passengers (MAP). If you try to factor in other job numbers from outside sources, things get really weird.
In December 1999, the pro-airport Orange County Business Council released a study showing an airport serving 24 MAP would create just 16,536 jobs at the airport. If you try marrying that number to the county's study, a mere 4 MAP account for nearly 10,000 jobs.
That's nothing. Three years ago, county officials said a much larger airport, serving 38 MAP, would create 30,300 aviation jobs. Here, 10 MAP create just 4,000 jobs.
And three years before that, in 1993, the pro-airport group Economic Research Associates concluded that an airport of indeterminate size would create 21,000 jobs. Where that number came from is anyone's guess, but it did become part of the now-defunct, George Argyros-backed Committee for 21,000 Jobs.
Right now, El Toro employs 160 people to run the horse stables, golf course, RV park and officers' club. Count on that number to stay steady for at least the next five years.
And let's not explore too much this irony: when county officials bang the drum for El Toro International Airport, they talk about the desperate need to create new jobs; but when they're sucking up to the county's powerful residential developers, they talk about the need to build more houses to attract more people to take the thousands of unfilled jobs. Is this place a zoo ruled by monkeys, or what?
