County, Newport Argue and Puzzle Over a Basis for Airport Settlement

A Board of Supervisors meeting dissolved in disorder and name-calling Tuesday after Newport Beach and county officials failed to reach an out-of-court settlement on the expansion of John Wayne Airport.

As supervisors and city officials looked quizzically at each other and wondered aloud whether anyone had actually offered to settle anything, the board approved a compromise in which any increase above 55 daily passenger jet departures will be limited to new planes that fly quieter than the McDonnell Douglas MD-Super 80, the dominant jetliner at John Wayne.

And after Newport Beach City Atty. Steven Pflaum arrived late to say that the city had made no commitments and might still sue the county over the airport, Supervisor Roger Stanton turned to fellow board members and said:

“Can you believe that? . . . I hope his nose grows.”

When Tuesday’s debate subsided, it was clear that the board had given final approval to an airport master plan permitting an increase from 41 daily departures to 55 on April 1, and up to 73 flights after a new terminal is completed in 1991.

Moreover, the board agreed to give unlimited departure privileges to a new, quieter jetliner--the British-made BAe-146--because the plane generates noise below the levels regulated by the county.

In accepting the proposed new master plan, the board was reiterating a Jan. 30 decision. The only change adopted to meet the challenge posed by the British jet involved establishment of a 90-day performance evaluation period and an environmental impact review before an airline can obtain an exemption from noise regulations for the aircraft.

As a practical matter, county officials believe there will be no rush by airlines to use the BAe-146 in unrestricted flights out of John Wayne because airlines do not yet have many of the new jets. And there are other constraints, such as passenger capacity at the terminal and the need for each airline to obtain operating agreements from the Board of Supervisors before it can serve John Wayne.

So far, only PSA has flown noise tests for the BAe-146 at John Wayne. In those tests, the jet was as quiet as a twin-engine, private, propeller plane or a single-engine turbocharged aircraft.

Airport Manager Murry Cable said the test results mean that the new jet “is simply expected to fade into the 90,000 operations (takeoffs and landings) by planes with similar noise levels that are unregulated each year.”

PSA officials said recently that they will not seek exemption for the BAe-146 from county noise regulations for the time being.

New Airlines Admitted

Under the new access plan given final approval Tuesday, two new airlines--America West and Jet America--will be given three departures each, beginning April 1.

And under a complex bonus plan, airlines will be allowed to exchange up to three of their flights that use the MD-Super 80 or similar aircraft for twice that number using quieter jets. However, the board changed the rules slightly Tuesday by basing such trades on the proportion of daily departures each airline is allowed at John Wayne.

The change, requested by AirCal, was seen by observers as a move to protect that airline from competition. AirCal is based at John Wayne and has a majority of the daily departures at the facility.

Similar efforts by the board in the past have met with lawsuits and federal court orders barring such alleged favoritism, but the county’s lawyers believe that Tuesday’s fine-tuning of the trade-out plan will survive court challenges.

Officials from competing airlines were unavailable for comment.

The new airport master plan puts a ceiling of 10.24 million commercial passengers per year at John Wayne in the year 2005. The airport now serves 2.5 million passengers a year in a facility originally designed to handle just 400,000.

While the vote Tuesday concluded more than two years of effort at developing a new master plan, the dispute with Newport Beach appeared far from resolution.

Private Bargaining Session

According to participants from both sides, a last-ditch attempt to reach an out-of-court settlement over airport expansion included a private bargaining session on Monday between city and county officials at the Hall of Administration in Santa Ana.

At the meeting, Peter Herman, an aide to Board of Supervisors Chairman Thomas F. Riley, asked city officials what they wanted in order to avoid further litigation (the city successfully sued to block airport expansion in 1981).

Although a laundry list of concessions to be made by the county emerged, no final agreements were reached.

Each side, however, left the meeting with a different impression. Newport Beach officials said they left assuming that negotiations were going nowhere and that the county had offered nothing new; county officials said they came out of the conference believing that if certain language were inserted into the airport master plan, litigation would be avoided.

Riley began Tuesday’s board discussion by stating that if the proposed language were adopted, he thought further court action could be avoided. Riley’s fellow board members took that to mean that a settlement was being negotiated right before their eyes and sought assurances that this was indeed true.

Some Items Approved

But as Herman and Newport Beach officials huddled over last-minute changes, the board went ahead and adopted some of the items sought by Newport Beach, including a limit of 55 flights by the noisier MD-Super 80s at John Wayne, and the naming of Supervisor Ralph Clark instead of Supervisor Bruce Nestande to a regional airport planning authority.

Only after those items were approved did Pflaum, Newport Beach’s lawyer, come forward to deny that any commitments had been made by the city.

Board members were outraged.

Ken Delino, a Newport Beach representative who sat in on both Tuesday’s board session and the private negotiating session held Monday, told The Times:

“We were caught by surprise by Riley’s representations to the board about our position. What happened at the board meeting was not anticipated by any member of the City Council or city staff.”

Delino added that he and other city representatives had left the Monday negotiating session “convinced that the county was not even listening to us.”

“Mr. Delino is lying,” Herman replied in an interview. “Mr. Delino has been and continues to be an obstacle to successful negotiations.”

More Disagreements

Similar accusations flew back and forth between other people Tuesday who had represented the two sides during Monday’s private talks.

“We asked the city if they had anything else they wanted and they did not raise anything,” Riley said. “We left thinking we had made substantial progress.”

A City Council member who requested anonymity said that Riley was “either daydreaming or deliberately falsifying the facts for political reasons.”

Newport Beach Councilwoman Evelyn Hart, who attended Monday’s closed discussions, declined comment.