Ca Great Park El Toro

When planners looked over the barren El Toro Marine base and tried to envision a sprawling park, one thing was clearly missing. Trees. The center of the closed base is flat, crisscrossed with runways and planted sparsely, a utilitarian piece of land that looks nothing like a park.

A decorated pilot who once flew out of El Toro Marine base has been named to the board planning to replace it with a large urban park. William G. Kogerman, 67, of Laguna Hills was picked Thursday to replace former Irvine Co. executive Richard G. Sim on the nine-member Orange County Great Park Corp.'s board of directors. Sim resigned abruptly in May after accusing park board leadership of wasteful spending and muddy priorities.

THE first time he took his future wife, Priscilla, on a date, Ken Smith bicycled her to an abandoned sand and gravel quarry west of Des Moines. "Terribly romantic," she recalled, straight of face. "It was a wasteland," he acknowledged. "Most people would see it as a wasteland. Central Park was a wasteland, you know."

The Orange County district attorney is investigating whether the Irvine board planning the proposed Great Park at the former El Toro Marine base violated the state's open meeting law by holding official sessions in Barcelona, Paris and New York City last fall. The inquiry by the office of Dist. Atty. Tony Rackauckas was confirmed Thursday by Wally Kreutzen, chief executive of the Orange County Great Park Corp.

With the naming of a master designer this week for the Orange County Great Park, supporters are agleam with its potential. Now comes the hard part: dealing with toxic leftovers at the former El Toro Marine base in Irvine where the park will be located. About 900 acres of concrete and asphalt runways must be pulverized and carted away.

For the last several weeks, a single question framed the increasingly contentious debate about plans for the Orange County Great Park: Is Ken Smith capable of executing a project of this expense, complexity and sheer size? Now that Smith and his team have been tapped to oversee the design of the 1,300-acre park, it should become clear that the issue has been something of a red herring all along.

Officials in Orange County on Monday selected a prominent New York landscape architect to design what will be one of the nation's largest urban parks, carved from runways of the closed El Toro Marine base. Selected as master planner for the $401-million project was Ken Smith, 52, who is best known for designing smaller parks in New York City and a new rooftop at the Museum of Modern Art.

When we last checked in on the Orange County Great Park, plans for the 1,300-acre project on the site of the former El Toro air base were moving ahead with promise, speed and a surprising lack of rancor. After a pair of juries trimmed 24 entries in an international design competition to three firms, momentum quickly gathered behind a single finalist, New York landscape architect Ken Smith.

The Orange County Grand Jury has launched an inquiry into the $649.5-million acquisition of the closed El Toro Marine base by one of the nation's largest home builders and the role of Irvine officials in planning for a huge public park there. The scope of the probe remains unclear, but Irvine officials have come under attack in recent months over the way contracts have been handled for the Orange County Great Park, the centerpiece of a 3,400-home community being developed by Lennar Corp.

Like someone enamored of three beguiling suitors, the Irvine park board couldn't make up its mind Thursday when it came to picking a master designer for the Orange County Great Park. "They're all so beautiful, and we want to keep a relationship with all of them," said a frustrated Steven Choi, an Irvine councilman and board member of the Orange County Great Park Corp. But alas, he said, "we can't marry all three."