Lake Forest Isn’t Afraid to Let Fists Fly to Fight Airport

To an outsider, Lake Forest sounds like much too mannered a place to even think about scuffling. The name alone conjures up images of chipmunks and fishes. It sounds like a place to go to read Thoreau, not pick a fight.

And yet, the city with the idyllic identity is trading punches with the County of Orange.

“You don’t push pioneers,” says former Councilwoman Marcia Rudolph, and to understand what she means, you have to contemplate the history not only of Lake Forest but of the entire area known as Saddleback Valley.

After the war, the area lured people with cheap land and houses that could be financed with FHA or VA loans. Men who had served either at the El Toro Marine base or Camp Pendleton came back and by the mid-1960s, the boomlet had begun. Mission Viejo was spawned and it wasn’t unusual for 2,000 people to be standing in line to get a number that would qualify them for a shot at, maybe, 50 home sites. Even then, as the developers began converting the farmland into suburbia and luring Angelenos and everyone else into Orange County’s wide-open spaces, the unincorporated Saddleback Valley had the county looking over its shoulder.

Not that it wanted to, mind you. When developers wanted to put in a six-story commercial building and a Kmart, residents balked. One of the results was the Saddleback Area Coordinating Council, which grew out of homeowner associations and which, according to Rudolph, “let Santa Ana know what our attitude was toward that kind of development.”

“They weren’t really afraid of the county,” Rudolph says. “They had respect for the county, but they were not afraid to collect a thousand or 500 signatures and march on the county board and exert what power they could put together.”

In those days, the nearest grocery store was in Tustin, everyone got their mail at a kiosk in burgeoning Mission Viejo, and lots of Saddleback Valley folks weren’t sure if they were city or country.

That split personality exists today, as residents of Foothills Ranch or Portola Hills, for example, probably still see themselves as country folk. They’ve settled there to get away from noise and commercial development--which brings them face-to-face with the prospect of a commercial airport at the El Toro Marine base.

That instinct to take on the county is still in the bloodlines.

“Historically, we’ve been a rather determined, somewhat stubborn group of people when it comes to knowing what’s best in the community,” Rudolph says. “That (feeling) hasn’t gone anywhere.”

If it’s a fight that’s in order, a fight it will be. “I don’t think it’s a thirst for the battle,” Rudolph says, “but those of us who are involved feel that we don’t have a choice. Maybe this is the way it’s always been. We’ve always been putting out fires and had our backs to the wall and have had no choice but to come out with the gloves on. And I’m talking about boxing gloves.”

Who’s got the leverage, she is asked. “I think we still have an incomplete understanding of our power,” Rudolph says. “We still think that we have to be nice to those guys. I think South County is stronger than we think we are. We are over half of the voters in the 3rd District and the majority in the 5th. I believe we have the ability, when we work together, to be extremely effective. What the cities need to understand and play to their advantage is that we have to pull with us the unincorporated area, because it’s large and financially and politically powerful.”

She’s talking about places such as Coto de Caza, Leisure World, Rancho Santa Margarita and other neighbors. South County airport opponents already are talking about the area’s potential ballot-box impact on the proposed half-cent sales tax increase. The veiled suggestion is that South County isn’t about to support any county-sponsored tax increase.

Around and around it goes. And even though the sales tax issue looms, the South County guns are aimed at the proposed airport voted in last November through Measure A.

“The most important thing in South County is that people have knowledge and understanding and confidence in their power to win the day,” Rudolph says, “because if they waver, there are an awful lot of people who will clean and pick their bones.”

By now, you’ve probably guessed the whole point of this is not to feel sorry for little Lake Forest. It may sound like a cupcake town, but it talks like a steel city brawler.

If the big boys in Santa Ana want a fight, they’ll have no problem finding one.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.