Green acres amid Orange County's sprawl

Move over, Manhattan. Stand aside San Francisco.

In Orange County, the final hurdle has been cleared for a "County Great Park" that will exceed the size of Central Park and Golden Gate Park put together. The massive park (4,738 acres), located in the former El Toro Air Base, will include riparian corridors and botanical gardens as well as facilities for sports and educational uses. And green space - lots of it - left over for other large urban parks.

In recent years, the cliché of Orange County as a conservative bastion of mirror-skinned high-rises and beachfront mansions has collided with images of mile-upon-mile of Korean, Vietnamese, and Spanish commercial strips. The area is considered America's leading laboratory of "post suburbia" because it lacks a traditional urban core yet provides citizens with most of the consumer, employment, and entertainment options formerly associated only with large cities.

Like other great metropolitan parks, the future "Great Park" is expected to provide the communal open space that can unite the amorphous and sprawling county with a common identity by bringing together disparate ethnic and economic groups. It is also being seen by some as a "quality-of-life" choice by a citizenship that favors open space over development.

"We are finally moving forward with a plan that will transform the future of Orange County," says Irvine Mayor Larry Agran.

With the annexation of land approved by the county this month, and a private sell-off to begin in weeks, the multiuse project will rise on the site of the shuttered El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, closed in 1999.

The approval came after years of public debate and a bitterly contested face-off with advocates of a new airport on the same site. It took four citizens' initiatives over several years to finally get voters to choose the park over an airport.

The project is also being touted as a win-win model for the private sell-off of other US bases that were closed in the 1990s. The existing El Toro base will be auctioned off to the highest bidders - in this case, four large parcels - and the result is expected to end the political and bureaucratic wrangling that has plagued this, and other base communities, following base closings.

Because of zoning arrangements, and agreements by winning bidders to dedicate swaths of open space to the city along with millions in fees, officials claim the Orange County Great Park will be self-supporting without federal, state, county, and city tax revenues. Nearly 10 years after the county garnered national visibility as the largest US municipality to declare bankruptcy, the Great Park is being touted as a symbol of rebound for the 3 million residents.

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