Panel Agrees to Let Guard Stay Until ’90 at Airport

The Air National Guard and the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners, after years of negotiations, have agreed that the Guard unit at Van Nuys Airport can stay through 1989 if necessary while the unit looks for a new home.

In return, the Guard agreed to increase the fee it pays the city for use of the runway from $76,000 to $300,000 a year. In addition, the Guard would be subject to a $235,235 monthly rent if it failed to vacate the Van Nuys site by the end of the decade, a whopping increase from its current lease of $1 a year.

That lease is due to expire June 30.

The Guard and the city also negotiated a three-way land deal that will deliver to the city in the year 2050 a federally owned tract at Ontario International Airport now valued at $5.8 million.

Unanimous Vote

The commissioners voted unanimously Wednesday to approve the agreement, recommended by the city Department of Airports. The settlement requires the approval of the mayor and the City Council, which usually is granted routinely.

The settlement, extending the all-but-free lease while quadrupling the runway fee, “appears to be the best that can be obtained,” said Donald Miller, property manager for the airport department.

“It is difficult, if not impossible, to calculate the amount of expenses incurred by the city as a result of the Guard’s use of the runways and taxiways. What is clear, however, is that the proposed fee is very attractive in relation to the fees that have been collected in the past.”

Gradual Fee Increase

Because the Guard is part of the military forces of California in peacetime, the state has been paying the city a runway use fee, which has grown slowly from $6,999 a year in 1948 to $76,000 as of July, 1982.

The commissioners voted to acquire eight acres of federally owned land that is part of a Guard base at Ontario International Airport, which is also operated by the Los Angeles Department of Airports.

The city will pay the federal government no money for the land, and agreed to lease it back to the Guard at no cost. The land will revert to the city in the year 2050, or at any time that the Guard fails to use the site for at least a year.

The 1,400-member Guard unit at Van Nuys, the 146th Tactical Airlift Wing, flies 16 C-130s, four-engine propjet cargo planes from a facility at the northwest corner of the airport. The operation is all that remains of the airfield’s role as an Army Air Corps base during World War II.

Miller said the federal government’s payment of only $1 a year to lease the site “is not surprising, since the city did not pay anything when it acquired the property from the United States.” The federal War Assets Administration donated the airfield to the city in 1947.

Site Long Coveted

The city airport department, which is trying to eliminate the airport’s $300,000-a-year operating deficit by leasing perimeter land to industrial and commercial developers, has long coveted the site occupied by the Guard. It is estimated that the 62-acre site, by far the largest undeveloped parcel, would bring in $1 million a year or more from developers.

Guard officers also want to move the unit’s headquarters. But it has been clear for at least two years that the Guard would be unable to find another home by the time the lease expired.

Besides, guard officers have said for years that the increase in housing around the airfield and the large number of civilian light planes at Van Nuys, the third-busiest airfield in the nation in number of takeoffs and landings, make military-style flying impossible. The wing’s planes are parked there, and its full-time headquarters and maintenance staff works there, but the planes are flown to other military bases in the area for training.

Because the Guard is a state unit but is also subject to control by the Air Force, the search for a new headquarters involves many layers of bureaucracy in both the state and federal governments.

Although the airport department’s report to the commissioners said that the Guard has decided to build a new facility at Point Mugu Naval Air Station just south of Oxnard, spokesmen for the Guard said the choice of a new site is not yet final.

Still under consideration are Norton Air Force Base in Riverside County and an Air Force site near Palmdale.

“Point Mugu is still the preferred site, but no final decision has been made,” said Col. Manuel Macias, deputy commander of the wing.

“The environmental impact statement has yet to be completed,” he said, “and after that the governor has a say, the state Guard headquarters has a say, the National Guard Bureau in Washington has a say and the Air Force has a say.”

The final decision will be made by the secretary of the Air Force, he said, probably in August.

It will take the wing two to three years to complete a move, he said, because of the time needed to construct new buildings.

Under the new agreement, the guard’s lease on part of its current acreage at Van Nuys would expire at the end of 1988, when it would turn over to the city 23.8 acres nearest the runways. The runway-use agreement also ends at that time.

A separate lease, on the tract where the headquarters and other buildings stand, would continue until Dec. 31, 1989.