Office Building at Van Nuys Airport Approved

The Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners on Wednesday approved construction of a three-story office building along the runway at Van Nuys Airport, but commissioners forbid parking there by jet aircraft, a victory for neighborhood anti-noise groups.

The board’s approval of a lease with Fly Away Partners was the conclusion of a yearlong dispute in which jet aircraft parking spaces became a key issue in a tug of war between noise protesters and airport administrators. There were no protests against parking propeller planes at the site.

The board approved a 40-year lease on a 2.3-acre site on the northeast corner of Sherman Way and Hayvenhurst Avenue, where Fly Away Partners plans to build a $3 million, 53,000-square-foot office building on the east side of one of the runways at the city-owned airfield.

The partnership will pay $44,000 a year for the site until 1990. The board recommended that the lease price then be increased to $50,000 a year, and the fee be reviewed for possible increases every 30 months afterward.

Dominant Issue

The controversy over whether to allow tenants of the building, or their visitors, to park business jets beside the building dominated three meetings of the board, including one stormy public meeting at the airport in November.

Indignant neighbors, members of anti-noise and homeowner groups, jammed the meeting and voiced complaints for two hours in what one commissioner said was probably the longest discussion of one subject in the history of the board.

Executives of the Los Angeles Department of Airports defended the project, saying it was intended precisely to satisfy noise complaints. They said they could have leased the land to a hangar operator who could have based 75 more aircraft at the field, which already has about 1,100 planes, including 16 jets.

Instead, they looked for a tenant who would build an office structure that would add few, if any, planes, they said. They offered to cut the number of jet spaces from four to two, and to limit them to transient planes, forbidding tenants from basing their own planes there.

The protesters rejected the compromise, arguing that any jet parking spaces would increase noise by encouraging more takeoffs and landings.

Proponents of the plan countered that the same number of business jets will come and go, even without the parking spaces, because the city has no authority to limit air traffic and there are many other areas at the airport where transient aircraft can park.

In number of takeoffs and landings, Van Nuys is the busiest general aviation airport in the nation and the third busiest of any kind. There were 492,382 takeoffs and landings last year, the Department of Airports said, a decrease of 14.5% from the previous year and the lowest total in 20 years.

The reduction has been attributed to a drop in use of small planes for business and pleasure flying.