Colorado Company Lands El Toro Runway Job

A Colorado recycling company was chosen this week to demolish the runways at the former El Toro Marine base, marking yet another step toward redevelopment of the 3,700-acre facility.

Recycled Materials Co. — based in Arvada, Colo. — will soon begin negotiations with the Orange County Great Park Corp., a nonprofit firm created by Irvine to oversee public-use construction at the former Marine base, city officials said. The nonprofit group received approval from its board to begin negotiations with the company at a meeting on June 23.

The decision by the board to approve negotiations with RMC ends two years of discusssion and debate by the group as to determining what to do with the Marin Corp. air base.

Two of the criteria that needed to be met by a company were to provide recycling, and have the recycling take place on site.

Glen Worthington, manager of planning and development for the agency, said that the agency hopes to complete negotiations with the company by the end of this year so the RMC can break ground on the demolition work.

The Colorado company will demolish the runways and other structures on the base at no cost to Irvine, then sell most of the recycled material for use in the redevelopment project.

Two keys to Great Parks Corp. choosing RMC, according to Worthington, were the following:

1. RMC's commitment of recycling and reuse of the material on site was outstanding. The company would be resusing all the material on the site where the project was conducted.

2. RMC has expertise in demolition work on a host of similar projects, including the Stapleton (Denver) airport.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Lennar Corp., which bought El Toro from the Navy earlier this year for $649.5 million, will use much of the material for private development projects at the site, including 3,400 homes and 3 million square feet of office and commercial space.

Though the terms of the deal must still be negotiated, including the price of the recycled material and the timeline of the project, Great Park and Irvine officials said they expected the demolition of the runways to begin as early as this fall.

That would virtually end the debate over whether El Toro will become a commercial airport.

The Great Park Corp. is governed by a board consisting of the five Irvine council members and three appointed directors who unanimously approved Recycled Materials Co.'s demolition bid over one submitted by a local partnership called Vulcan/Ortiz Enterprises Inc.