No Quick Study on Site for Airport : Aviation: The panel seeking an alternative for Lindbergh Field wants more time and money to do the job. One councilman calls it a waste.

The panel studying the relocation of Lindbergh Field agreed Thursday to extend its review another year and spend $350,000 to $400,000 more to examine the “multiple airport option” unveiled last month by San Diego City Councilmen Ron Roberts and Bob Filner.

If approved today by the San Diego Assn. of Governments’ Board of Directors, the Airport Policy Advisory Committee’s recommendation would about double the cost and duration of the search for an alternative to increasingly crowded Lindbergh Field, a study financed by a $350,000 Federal Aviation Administration grant.

But Filner, who with Roberts led the call for a look at the two-airport plan, said the effort will be worthless because of restrictions on the scope of the study imposed by the panel.

“It’s a complete waste of money,” Filner said after the panel’s meeting. “It’s just a complete waste of money.”

Filner claimed that, as now written, the new study will automatically reject the multiple-airport option and point toward the three alternatives already identified by the Sandag airport committee: Miramar Naval Air Station, a tract east of Miramar and a huge parcel on Otay Mesa.

That is because the new examination will require that at least one of the region’s airports accommodate 20 million passengers annually, a 12,000-foot runway, 5,000-foot safety zones at either end of the runway, simultaneous landings on widely separated landing strips, and full instrument-landing capacity. Under consideration would be Lindbergh, Brown and Montgomery fields in San Diego, Gillespie Field in El Cajon and McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad.

Filner and Roberts’ multiple airport option is based on the assumption that no site in the county could accommodate the estimated 35 million airline passengers expected to fly here by the middle of next century. It seeks to determine whether the load could be parceled out to Lindbergh and an expanded Brown Field, along with Montgomery and McClellan-Palomar airports. The Sandag panel added Gillespie to the list.

The councilmen believe that Miramar could handle the traffic, but believe it is politically unlikely that the Navy would allow a civilian or joint-use airport there.

Roberts aide Wayne Raffesberger said the safety zone and runway length requirements would rule out Lindbergh, and the safety zone and instrument-landing requirements would appear to eliminate the expanded Brown Field plan unveiled by the councilmen last month with the help of a coalition of South Bay landowners. But he was hesitant to condemn the study entirely.

“Those criteria, if strictly applied would appear to eliminate all five of those airports, I think,” Raffesberger said. But, he added, “I don’t know what to make of it yet. We hadn’t seen those criteria.” Roberts is attending an Urban Land Institute meeting out of town and could not be reached for comment.

Hedy St. John, chairwoman of the study panel’s technical committee, said she “would respectfully disagree” with Filner’s assessment, arguing that, even at Lindbergh, land could be purchased to accommodate 5,000-foot safety zones at either end of the airport’s 9,400-foot single runway.

Moreover, she argued, safety criteria should not be compromised at the beginning of the study. “To compromise the standards and give the people of this region inadequate air and ground safety is not acceptable as a starting point,” St. John said.

The Air Line Pilots Assn., which favors the joint use of Miramar as the safest alternative, endorsed the safety criteria at a meeting of the technical committee Wednesday.

South Bay politicians, including U.S. Rep. Jim Bates, D-San Diego, State Sen. Wadie Deddeh, D-Chula Vista, and Filner, will ask Sandag in a letter to be delivered today to consider the joint use of Miramar, Filner said. An ALPA official also has signed that letter, he said.