Airport Neighbors Press Noise Issue : Van Nuys Jet-Parking Plan Halted

Indignant neighbors of Van Nuys Airport jammed a meeting of the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners Wednesday and blocked a plan to allow a proposed office building at the airport to have two parking spaces for visiting business jets.

Department of Airports executives and a spokesman for the builder of the proposed project argued that the two temporary parking spaces would have no noticeable effect on noise.

But individual residents and representatives of homeowners groups said they are fed up with aircraft noise from the city-owned airport. After 12 people had spoken heatedly against the plan, three of the five commissioners said they would vote against a proposed lease with the builder.

With rejection a certainty, commission President Johnnie Cochran headed off a vote and sent the issue back to the Department of Airports staff, with instructions to try to renegotiate the lease with a provision that no jet parking be allowed.

Cochran said the department should offer some other concession to the builders, Fly Away Partners, because the partnership had spent two years planning the building and repeatedly agreed to the city’s requests for concessions to decrease its impact on the surrounding neighborhood.

Raymond J. Staton, an attorney representing Fly Away Partners, said the builders would have to reconsider “whether the building is economically viable. I don’t think it killed it, but we have to go back to the drawing board.”

At issue was a 40-year lease on a 2.3-acre site on the northeast corner of Sherman Way and Hayvenhurst Avenue, where Fly Away Partners proposed to spend $3 million to construct a three-story, 53,000-square-foot office building alongside a runway.

The provision for jet parking spaces became a top target for the increasingly vocal and effective coalition of homeowners groups that protest aircraft noise.

The board had taken up the issue at two previous meetings, each time delaying action because of homeowners’ protests.

Executives of the airports department, defending the project, said it was intended precisely to meet homeowners’ noise complaints. They said the land could otherwise have been turned over to a hangar operator who could have added parking spaces for as many as 75 more aircraft that would be based on the airfield.

They said they negotiated a lease under which the land would be devoted to an office building that would generate little or no air traffic. The lease said that planes could park at the building while executives had business inside but that no planes could be based there.

“You sit there year after year, saying there won’t be more noise, and we’re not going to stand for it any longer,” said E. J. Peaker, an actress who said she has nightmares caused by air traffic over her Encino home.

She said the board must respond to their complaints “or you are going to be besieged by a multitude of lawsuits.”

Another speaker introduced himself as “from Boston, where they had the tea party, remember?”

“We’re not looking for a compromise of two down from four jets, but from four down to zero,” said Don Schultz, president of Ban Airport Noise, a homeowners group that protests aircraft noise from both Van Nuys and Burbank airports.