Political Scientist’s Complex Formula for LAX

Earlier this year, Mayor James K. Hahn’s $11-billion modernization plan for Los Angeles International Airport appeared to be dead.

Powerful critics, including City Council members, airlines, business groups and residents, were arrayed against it, saying it was too expensive and failed to make the airport more secure.

But Hahn refused to budge -- potentially throwing away 10 years’ work and more than $120 million in studies and consultant fees.

Then one afternoon late last spring, the soft-spoken city councilwoman who represents airport-area communities clicked into the mayor’s office on her high heels, one of her ever-present broaches flashing like a general’s ribbons.

“You told me that if someone has a better idea, they should come up with a plan,” Cindy Miscikowski told the mayor. “So I did.”

The council overwhelmingly approved the plan last month, and will vote again today on environmental and technical issues.

Miscikowski’s pronouncement in the mayor’s office signaled her takeover of the LAX modernization process -- something she was uniquely equipped to do. The two-term councilwoman single-handedly rescued one of the most complicated and expensive public works projects in the city’s history, but enraged many of her constituents in the process.

Lisa Gritzner, Miscikowski’s former chief of staff, calls encounters like the one between Miscikowski and the mayor, the councilwoman’s “Xena: Warrior Princess” moments, comparing her determination to that of the feminist cult superhero from the 1990s TV show who roamed ancient Greece doing good and fighting evil.

Miscikowski’s weapon -- born of great passion and hours of obsessive study -- is her uncanny ability to wield arcane zoning and planning codes.

George Kieffer, chairman of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, noted that Winston Churchill once said his whole life had prepared him to be a wartime prime minister. Likewise, Kieffer said, “Cindy’s whole career was in preparation for what she was able to do in respect to the LAX master plan.”

A multimillionaire who need never work another day in her life, Miscikowski spent much of last spring secluded with thousands of pages of dry airport reports about soil, air quality and traffic.

Then she salvaged Hahn’s proposal using a little-understood bureaucratic tool known as a specific plan that allowed her to slice the mayor’s plan into two phases and consign the most controversial parts to a distant future.

Unpopular aspects, such as demolishing Terminals 1, 2 and 3 and building an off-site check-in center that some said would make passengers more vulnerable to a terrorist attack, were placed in a holding pattern that requires more rigorous study.

This unconventional approach could still collapse. Even as the council votes today, the county Board of Supervisors will consider filing a suit against the city. Other opponents may also go to court.

Still, Miscikowski’s move was a politically bold solution from a politician best known as a policy wonk. The 56-year-old councilwoman, who will be forced out next year by term limits, sees the airport plan as a cornerstone of her legacy.

Some of her colleagues, however, assailed her specific plan as dishonest because it enshrines projects such as the check-in center that many city officials don’t want to see built.

And she alienated many constituents who furiously charge that her plan is a backdoor to airport expansion.

“I feel we’ve been really undermined by Cindy,” said Valeria Velasco, a 16-year Playa del Rey resident who heads the Alliance for a Regional Solution to Airport Congestion. Ruth Galanter, the former city councilwoman who represented the airport area for 15 years, was even harsher. “Why did she do it? It was a bad plan,” Galanter said. “Why she picked screwing her constituents as a legacy is beyond me.”

But Miscikowski’s friends are not surprised that she risked the anger of her constituents to do what she felt was right for the whole city.

“She’s not a politician. She wasn’t trained as a politician. She isn’t, frankly, a great politician,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a former councilman who worked closely with Miscikowski.

Unlike most of her colleagues, for example, the councilwoman does not employ a spokesman. She returns calls herself, and instead of sound bites offers streams of paragraphs that are difficult to quote.

Miscikowski says the city had to do something to save the plan. When it appeared no one else was going to do it, she stepped in. “We had to get our act together,” she said.

Such decisive action is becoming rarer on the City Council. Eight-year term limits mean few officials absorb the institutional knowledge to rework a project as complicated as the airport plan.

Miscikowski has lived for Los Angeles public policy for more than 30 years. In 1972, she was hired to work for then-Councilman Marvin Braude. The crotchety but visionary former college professor pushed cutting-edge environmental measures such as banning oil drilling off the coast, relying on Miscikowski, who became his chief of staff, to help him do it.

She had studied chemistry at UCLA, but Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated less than 10 miles from campus and, amid the tumult of the 1960s, she switched to political science.

Early on, she discovered that she loved the city’s planning code. In a way, it was like chemistry: Just as the elements in the periodic table gave shape to complex compounds, zoning rules gave shape to the vast and fantastic city.

And, as in chemistry, minor tweaks in the basic building blocks could yield dramatically different results. In 1986, in a feat that still causes Miscikowski to giggle in triumph, she changed 18 words in the city’s planning code, altering the height restrictions for 80% of the land in the city.

Later that year, a wealthy land-use attorney named Doug Ring, who had been on the opposite side of a citywide battle over rules limiting development, asked her out. Within two years, they were married. When she’s not working 18-hour days, Miscikowski and Ring travel and collect modern art for their Brentwood home.

In 1997, Braude retired and Miscikowski was elected to his seat.

As term limits ushered all 14 of her colleagues out the door, she became the council’s senior member and self-described “mother hen.”

She was also, routinely, the best prepared. Her colleagues grew to dread “the look” she shot them when it was apparent they hadn’t done their homework.

“If she’s indicated that she’s thoroughly reviewed something and looked at all alternatives and come to the conclusion that this is best way to move this thing forward, that carries lots of respect on the City Council,” Hahn said.

In 2002, the council reapportioned its districts, and Miscikowski inherited LAX and surrounding communities.

Shortly after that, Hahn unveiled his plan for the airport, but residents, airline executives and business leaders objected to it and chafed under the imperious attitude of the mayor’s top aides.

Even the councilwoman said she was stonewalled by the mayor’s office, which told airport officials to withhold public documents from her. But she was not deterred.

Her husband recalled, with a mixture of awe and horror, the day she finally obtained the 36,000-page environmental report on Hahn’s plan. She took it to their vacation home in Santa Fe, N.M., where she devoured it as eagerly as if she were a kid with the new Harry Potter book.

“Look, I married a weird one. I don’t know what to tell you,” Ring said. Aside from a few lawyers, Ring said, his wife may be “the only person on the planet that has read it.” By last spring, as the plan headed for a City Council vote in which its prospects appeared bleak, Miscikowski had become an authority on it. She had flown to Washington to meet with experts and held her own round table sessions with the airport plan’s opponents.

“It was the hardest thing she’s ever done,” recalled Gritzner, her former chief of staff. “There were days when we would sit in the office and look at each other and say, ‘What are we doing here?’ ”

In October, council members overwhelmingly gave preliminary approval to Miscikowski’s airport plan. A few weeks later, the councilwoman briefly considered applying for the council’s chief legislative analyst job. Now she is not sure what she’ll do, but imagines it will be something for Los Angeles.

“My heart and soul really is in this city,” she said.