Future Shaky for Divided Van Nuys Airport Panel

In the spring of 1985, Los Angeles City Council members came to a San Fernando Valley junior high school for a public hearing on Van Nuys Airport and were bowled over by the passion of the angry debate between noise protesters and aircraft owners.

They had an idea. Why couldn’t both sides sit down together, discuss their problems calmly, find mutual solutions and recommend them to the council?

Thus was born the Van Nuys Airport Citizens Advisory Council.

Four years later, the council faces an uncertain future, torn apart by the same polarization and intense feelings that led to its birth.

Anti-noise activists, who say the council has been hopelessly divided from the start, want to dissolve it. They say the panel has been overrun by pro-airport members and no longer represents the concerns of homeowners who live with daily aircraft noise.

Council Walkout

The longstanding rancor erupted at a meeting two weeks ago at which five of the 10 members present stormed out of the room and threatened to resign. Two say they intend to remain, two are undecided and one plans to quit.

Meanwhile, a homeowner group has entered the fray, demanding that an entirely new group composed exclusively of residents be formed. Pilots and airport-based businesses have no place on a panel of residents, they say.

“There already is an airport tenants council,” said Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, which represents 850 families, many of whom he said are affected by airport noise.

“There already is a sounding board for them. For them to sit on a citizens panel is patently outlandish. It’s like a board looking to clean up air pollution and water pollution and instead of putting scientists and community leaders on, they put on the polluters. It’s like putting Exxon on a panel to deal with how shipping should go down the coast.”

Spearheading the revolt on the council is Don Schultz, one of the panel’s original members, who is also president of Ban Airport Noise, long a foe of the Burbank and Van Nuys airports.

“The residents got this council started,” Schultz said. “It was supposed to be a citizens group and it has ceased being responsive to citizen interests.”

City Councilman Joel Wachs, who appointed Schultz to the advisory group and represents the district in which the city-owned airport is located, says he’s wrong.

“It was set up so the aviation community could work with residents,” said Wachs’ deputy, Renee Weitzer. “That’s what it was set up for and that’s what he wants to happen. Joel still feels it’s a viable thing and that it should continue.”

Denies Bias

Some members of the airport council expressed similar sentiments. Lee K. Alpert, an attorney who lives in Northridge, has been pegged by resident council members as pro-aviation. But, like other members who say they are neutral, Alpert denies any bias and said he decides each issue case by case, trying to balance community and airport interests.

“Noise is a significant problem that our group has to deal with,” Alpert said. “But it is not the only problem.” He said he wants the advisory board to remain intact, with a diversity of interests represented.

“The airport is going to exist, and more and more residents are coming into the area,” Alpert said. “We have to find a way to coexist.”

Van Nuys Airport was built as a small landing strip in 1928 when the Valley was still a vast, rural outpost of Los Angeles. That strip has gradually grown into the busiest general aviation airport in the nation--and the seventh busiest in the world--with 672,000 takeoffs and landings a year.

At the same time, farms surrounding the airfield have given way to housing tracts and mini-malls, and the chicken farmers who once complained about noise from propeller planes have been replaced by organized homeowner groups fighting the din of small business jets and charter craft.

Meanwhile, the tension between those using the airport and those who wish it would simply go away has steadily mounted.

1 Unanimous Decision

In the four years since the council was created to offer advice on the airport, it has reached a unanimous decision on only one of nearly 100 items that have come before it, Schultz said.

And instead of mending old wounds and hammering out solutions to their differences, as council members hoped, the citizens panel has become a forum for the rivalries of homeowners intent on limiting use of the airport, and pilots and airport-based businesses who want to see it grow.

There have been victories on both sides:

*In 1988, the advisory council voted unanimously to recommend that an aviation museum and park be built on part of the 62-acre corner of the airport that the Air National Guard plans to vacate by 1990. That recommendation has been included in all four plans under consideration for the site.

*Early this year, a sharply divided council recommended approval of plans by Skytrails Aviation to expand onto two additional acres at the airport, adding parking tie-downs for 35 planes. Airport commissioners heeded that recommendation and approved Skytrails’ request despite strong objections from anti-noise council members who complained that the expansion would lead to more noise.

Resident members were also angered that the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners approved the plan based on a decade-old environmental study, which found that the project would have minimal impact on surrounding areas.

*In 1986, the council narrowly approved a recommendation to ban touch-and-go training operations on weekends and holidays. The issue is still under consideration by the airport commission.

*In 1987, the council, again by a narrow majority, voted to ask for a study on banning takeoffs between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.--an issue that will be covered by a comprehensive federal noise-control study now under way. Presently, there is a night takeoff ban on only the loudest planes, those classified by the Federal Aviation Administration as exceeding 74 decibels on takeoff.

*And in October, 1987, and then again in June, the airport commissioners, with no prodding from the council, passed resolutions stating their intention to reduce the amount of land used for general aviation purposes from more than 219 acres today to 166 acres by the end of 1990.

That is not expected to immediately affect the number of flights at the airport, since much of the land involved will be vacated by tenants who do not generate many flights. In addition, other airport tenants can add to flight operations if there is room on their property.

But council member Robert R. Jackson, a professional pilot and aerial photographer, views the resolution as a concession.

“How dare they talk about not getting their way,” Jackson said of the anti-noise faction. “This outfit is regressing, and these people talk about not getting their way. All I have to say is, ‘Bah, humbug!’ ”

For residents, however, the bottom line is noise. They say there’s more of it all the time.

Robert Beard, a noise abatement officer for the city Department of Airports, agrees with them. Noise has increased in recent years, he said.

Higher Density

Noise control records indicate that the number of residences in the highest-noise zone increased from 61 in 1986 to 678 in 1988, he said, although new apartments built in the affected area account for much of the increase. Changes in the method of computing the data also are a factor, he said.

Short of banning all night operations or imposing noise limits, there is little chance of soothing the anti-noise faction’s complaints.

“I really am very hopeless about the whole situation,” council member Lisa Barrena said. “The noise is getting louder and louder. If we could sell the house and walk out tomorrow, that would be one thing. But my husband is 84 and I’m 72, and we’ve been here all these years.”

From 1980 to 1989, at a time when total aircraft at Van Nuys decreased from 1,372 to 951, the number of jets increased from 18 to 93 and helicopters increased from 21 to 61, Schultz said.

Airport spokesman Bob Hayes argues that many of the new planes are quieter because of technological advances. But residents who live under the flight path disagree, which is why they want a unanimous voice on development issues before the advisory council. That, in turn, would give them more clout before airport commissioners and the City Council, they say.

The pro-flying faction sees no reason to give them more power, and no agreements are in sight.

The protesters “think the council was put together to be an anti-noise council,” said Clay Lacy, owner of a large charter aircraft firm and chairman of the council. “But that’s not what the bylaws are all about.”