Airport Noise Measure Wins Initial OK by Long Beach

The City Council this week gave preliminary approval to a new airport noise ordinance, despite widespread dissatisfaction with the measure that will likely keep alive the ongoing legal fracas over sound levels at the Long Beach Airport.

The commercial airlines that succeeded in getting the city’s old noise controls struck down in federal court more than a year ago do not like the newest version much better than the old.

“We consider the ordinance to be unconstitutional and illegal,” said John J. Lyons, lead attorney for the nine commercial airlines that have sued the city over its airport noise laws. “It’s a continued effort by the city to unreasonably restrict access to the airport. It’s disappointing.”

Lyons intends to raise his objections at the next court session in the airlines’ lawsuit, later this month.

“It’s a clever, tricky way of seeing we don’t get any more flights, but I don’t think the judge will be fooled,” Lyons said.

Unlike the old regulations, which controlled noise by limiting the number of daily flights, the new ordinance regulates decibel levels.

U.S. District Judge Laughlin E. Waters in late 1988 overturned the city’s flight limits, ruling they were arbitrary and discriminatory against airlines. He ordered the city to draw up new regulations that would control noise without setting a daily flight quota.

The council gave preliminary approval to the new rules in October. But public criticism of the new ordinance was so extensive that the council postponed its final vote to give city staff time to review the public concerns. That review resulted in two revisions in the proposal, which was voted on in its new form this week and which will be returned to the council for a final vote in two weeks. Waters will then decide if the regulations are satisfactory.

The new ordinance would establish limits on the amount of noise that can be generated at each takeoff and landing, as well as the overall average noise level generated in a year’s time. Those limits would hold total airport noise to about its current level, according to noise experts who testified in the lawsuit.

One of the recent revisions creates an administrative hearing process to handle contested violations. The other, made at the request of federal aviation officials, eliminates a provision prohibiting runway intersection takeoffs.

Virtually everyone affected by the ordinance has complaints about it.

Homeowners in neighborhoods bordering the airport are unhappy at the demise of flight quotas. Pilots of small planes are unhappy about a provision that reduces the amount of noise permitted late at night, thereby reducing the number of their flights. The larger air carriers argue that the decibel limits continue to unfairly restrict their operations at an airport ripe for expansion.

And the Federal Aviation Administration, which for years has objected to Long Beach’s noise regulations as too restrictive, still has many of the same concerns.

In a recent letter to the city, FAA attorney Gregory Walden said that although his agency had not yet finished reviewing the city’s new noise regulations, “Our review to date only confirms our preliminary views that much work remains to be done to fashion reasonable, non-discriminatory, and non-arbitrary noise rules that impose no undue burden upon air commerce.”

Even City Council members do not like the new ordinance, saying they prefer flight quotas but have no choice but to abide by the court’s orders. “We have to follow the guidelines from the judge,” said Councilman Jeffrey A. Kellogg, whose district lies just northwest of the airport.

The council unanimously approved the ordinance on first reading, with Councilman Warren Harwood absent.