City Urged to Clear Air in Contest Between Planes, High-Rises

Why does downtown’s First National Bank Building (formerly Columbia Centre) have sides that look like steps?

To leave some holes between the high-rises for the airplanes to fly through.

Airport Manager M.A. (Bud) McDonald laughs as he tells the joke. But for McDonald and a growing number of San Diego officials, the prospect of airplanes threading their way through the high-rises isn’t very funny anymore.

As skyscrapers proliferate downtown and more buildings go up in nearby Mission Hills, concern is growing about whether these structures interfere with the flight path for Lindbergh Field.

If the development continues unchecked, especially on the wide hills north of downtown and just east of the airport, the implication is clear, McDonald and other city leaders say.

If planes are to take off and land at a safe angle above the buildings, Lindbergh Field may have to shorten its main runway.

And if that happens, they warn, the airport would have to scale down its service. It could go from handling transcontinental and international flights to small commuter planes.

In any event, the future of San Diego’s airport is at stake, said John Tompkins, San Diego coordinator for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). “I think the city has to take responsibility for determining one thing: Do they want high-rise buildings or do they want a functional airport?” he said.

The problem only became critical recently, as the economy flourished and construction revived. “In the ‘70s, during the recession, things were quiet,” McDonald said. “But now we’re talking high-rises downtown and development moving straight up Park Boulevard.” And the farther north they go, the closer they get to the final approach to the airport, he said.

“You can build all sorts of high-rises up there,” he continued. “But if you do, we’ll have to shorten the runway. We can shorten it from 7,900 feet to 4,000 feet--but all you’ll be doing is flying 100 passengers between San Diego and Los Angeles.”

McDonald wants to protect a 1,000-foot-wide corridor due east of the airport, from the end of the main runway up the hill to the western border of Balboa Park. He and FAA officials say they don’t want San Diego’s airport to go the way of Orange County’s John Wayne Airport, where encroaching high-rises have made high-frequency navigational equipment difficult and sometimes impossible to use.

At Councilwoman Gloria McColl’s request, the city’s Transportation and Land Use Committee has asked for a report on the issue on April 17. The following day, the city Planning Commission will conduct a workshop on the same topic.

Transportation committee consultant Betsy McCullough suggested Thursday that, at the least, the city may want to create a new “height overlay zone,” restricting building heights in areas under the flight path.

There is no zoning that protects the airport, Assistant Planning Director Mike Stepner said. There has always been an informal agreement among the city; the San Diego Unified Port District, which operates the airport, and the FAA that when a planned building exceeds FAA height limits, the project must be reviewed by the FAA.

Although the FAA can recommend against a project--by calling it a hazard to air traffic--it has no formal authority to block construction, and will restrict flights rather than ask a city to change its zoning.

“Sometimes there’s been a change in the flight path rather than a change in the building,” Stepner said.

Also, under city regulations, if a project conforms to zoning laws, the city could not legally reject a building permit even if the

FAA considers the building a hazard, Stepner said. Usually, however, city officials can encourage a developer to redesign his project so that it doesn’t interfere with the flight path, Stepner said.

Still, he said, the question of what to do about development around the airport “has been a longstanding concern as we started to intensify development downtown. It’s been a very sensitive issue.”

Actually there have been several questions, Stepner said: “Whether the airport should move or not? And how do you deal with a growing city around the airport--do you put limits around the airport? Or around the city? It’s heated up and cooled off many times.”

The catalyst for the debate was the six-story, 200-room Balboa Park Hotel, proposed for 6th Avenue and Juniper Street. The project was reviewed by the FAA in December and was ruled an “obstruction” to aircraft.

The designation is a less objectionable category than the FAA designation “hazard.” Many buildings in downtown San Diego or in Mission Hills are termed obstructions, Tompkins said Thursday, and their construction in or near the flight path has been permitted although they have been required to install special warning lights on the roofs.

But in the case of this hotel, the Port District immediately appealed the “obstruction” designation, asking that the FAA’s Washington office give the building its “hazard” designation.

The hotel’s developer, Malcolm Hughes, president of Maxim Pacific Inc. of La Jolla, said he is perplexed about why the Port District has made an issue out of his hotel.

Hughes said he has owned the property since 1979 and initially planned to build an eight-story condominium project there. That project received complete city approvals by 1981, including approval from the FAA, which also dubbed the project an obstruction, not a hazard. Hughes said he never built that project because the economy turned sour, but during the entire permit process--and two, one-year extensions of the FAA obstruction designation--”the port did not oppose or in any way object” to the project.

Hughes also noted that his is by no means the tallest building in the neighborhood. One block away on Kalmia Street is a 12-story building and near it is the 10-story Imperial Tower. “I don’t understand it (the port’s opposition),” he said. If the delays continue, he added, he feared they could kill his project.

Also mystified by the port’s opposition was Karen McDonald, an air traffic technician with the FAA’s Los Angeles office. “I do not know why this particular project generated concern because there are numerous determinations of buildings as obstructions, not as hazards, in the San Diego area,” she said.

The hotel does not physically obstruct the “operational approach” to the airport, Karen McDonald noted, although it does interfere with an imaginary line the FAA constructs for aircraft approaches.

But Lindbergh Field manager Bud McDonald said the Port District objected to this hotel as a first effort to stem the tide of development near the flight path.

“We’re not picking on them,” McDonald said. “It’s just the idea that every time I turn around, there’s another building closer and closer. . . . It was kinda like, ‘Here comes another one. Maybe we should look at the whole side of this hill--the whole idea that San Diego is growing.’ It’s the camel under the tent.”