Cities to Fight Loss of Local Rule Close to Airports

Palos Verdes Estates City Manager James Hendrickson said he was stunned by a letter telling him the city must now get county approval for most of its basic planning and zoning decisions.

The letter “about knocked me off my seat,” Hendrickson said.

In terse terms, the letter from James Hartl, head of the county Department of Regional Planning, informed Hendrickson that, since his city lies within two miles of Torrance Municipal Airport, a recent amendment to state law now requires it to get county approval for most development within that area.

Palos Verdes Estates is one of seven South Bay cities that fall within the two-mile radius of Torrance Municipal Airport.

“I certainly was not aware that anything of this magnitude was coming down,” Hendrickson said as he tried to make sense of the complex legislation to which Hartl referred. “You just wonder how something like this slips through.”

Officials in 38 other cities within two miles of Los Angeles County’s 17 airports are wondering the same thing.

The legislation, passed in 1970 and amended last year, requires counties to set up Airport Land Use Commissions to develop special guidelines for what may be built around each airport. The idea was to help preserve airports by preventing development that could create safety hazards or be affected by airport noise, said Peter Detweiler, a consultant to the state Senate Local Government Committee, which has tracked response to the law.

Airports that serve commercial airlines, such as LAX and Long Beach, were first ordered to create the plans in 1970. General aviation airports, including such facilities as Torrance, Santa Monica and Hawthorne airports, were added in 1984.

Because the law carried no deadline or penalty for failing to act, however, officials say it was largely ignored. By late last year, plans for only 57% of the state’s 269 airports had been filed.

In Los Angeles, none of the required 17 plans have been prepared.

Frustrated by the poor response, Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) last summer easily won passage of amendments--which became effective Jan. 1--creating a June 30, 1991, deadline for the plans and adding new steps to ensure they are created quickly.

For airports without plans, almost all development and zone changes within two miles must be submitted for commission review. Only minor remodeling projects and construction of individual houses may be exempted.

Although the commission can study an airport and vote to shrink its two-mile boundary, officials admitted that could take awhile.

At first, Los Angeles County officials insisted that vague wording in the legislation exempted the county entirely from drawing up plans. Two months ago, however, county lawyers decided that the Regional Planning Commission would have to take on the duties after all.

Late last month, county planners began sending out Hartl’s letter asking cities to send in zoning maps and general plans for affected areas, which, in the case of Torrance airport, include portions of all four Palos Verdes Peninsula cities, Redondo Beach, the city of Los Angeles and nearly all of Lomita.

“This is, basically, preemption of the planning authority of the cities,” Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert said. “If you were to take a map of the entire Los Angeles basin and draw two-mile circles around the airports, you would see a rather dramatic effect on local land-use options and local governments.

“If this is aimed at keeping airports open, I think it has just the reverse effect.”

Torrance officials learned of the legislation this fall when a group of pilots sued to block construction of 52 homes and an office building on the site of a former school under Torrance airport’s departure path.

Furious at news that they would have to submit for county review a project they already had approved, City Council members threatened to close the airfield. The suit has since been withdrawn, and the city has taken no formal action toward closure.

In Hawthorne, where the municipal airport’s two-mile area of influence would also affect projects in El Segundo, Gardena, Inglewood, Lawndale, Redondo Beach and both the city and county of Los Angeles, initial reactions were similar.

“At first when I saw this legislation, I thought, ‘Gosh, this could really hurt us. Maybe it’s time to close the airport to avoid this,’ ” Hawthorne City Manager Kenneth Jue said.

Jue quickly dropped the idea when he discovered that the circle of influence from LAX also overlapped much of that drawn around Hawthorne airport.

“We can’t avoid it,” he said.

Hawthorne officials are particularly concerned because they hope soon to complete plans to redevelop a stretch of Imperial Highway parallel to the new Century Freeway.

Initial proposals have included high-rise hotels and office buildings, which could be judged incompatible with either Hawthorne airport or LAX.

For their part, county planners are bracing for an onslaught of review applications they acknowledge they are not equipped to handle.

“We’ve got 39 cities we think are impacted by this, and they have 39 city attorneys and probably 39 different opinions,” said John Huttinger, the county’s assistant administrator for community planning. “If every city sent over every case, we’d have thousands of cases and . . . the repercussions and impacts could be profound.”

Some cities, noticing there is no specific penalty for failing to submit cases to the county, have asked Huttinger what would happen if they simply did not do so.

“That’s a very good question,” he said. “We’re not a policeman. . . . To be perfectly frank, we’d like to see less cases filed so we can concentrate on doing the plans.”

Failing to submit cases, however, could lead to lawsuits by pilot and consumer groups, warned Detweiler, the Senate consultant.

He suggested that rather than ducking the issue, cities should ask the commission to shrink the two-mile boundary and should find money to complete a land-use plan themselves.

“The affected cities for an airport could band together and hire a consultant to do the plan and then take it to the commission and say, ‘Hey, we just saved you six months. Do us first,’ ” Detweiler said.

Instead, many cities have asked their Sacramento lobbyists to push for amendments that could ease the problem.

“It is just such a plain old mess that we’ll have to get some kind of legislative fix,” Torrance City Atty. Kenneth Nelson said. “I think it’s just about unworkable now.”

California League of Cities officials said the reaction by Los Angeles cities has surprised them.

“It just seems like the people who would be really upset would be the developers, who are going to see all these delays, but they didn’t react to it,” said Sheryl Patterson, a legislative attorney for the league.

Now that the league sees the full impact of the legislation, she said, “there is going to be some cleanup legislation, definitely.”