Airport Monorail Work to Be Late in Starting

Construction of a long-awaited, half-mile airport monorail probably will begin several months behind schedule in July and will have to be retrofitted to the new John Wayne Airport passenger terminal, officials said Monday.

Last week airport officials complained that they had not heard for three months from McDonnell Douglas Realty Co., which has agreed to pay for the $4-million monorail, as the airport construction progressed. Now, the monorail will be more difficult to align with the nearly completed airport complex.

Supervisor Thomas F. Riley, in whose district the airport is located, said that he met Monday in his office with representatives of McDonnell Douglas, the airport, his staff, and the Transportation Group Inc., the firm that will build the monorail, in an effort to resolve the communication problem.

“They are still very committed to the project,” said Riley, referring to McDonnell Douglas and TGI. “But they realize that the effort--as far as the construction in the airport is concerned--will be more expensive due to retrofitting. They missed some opportunities to have it included in the current terminal project.”

Riley added, however, that he “made a commitment. . . . We left here with the fact that would try to facilitate the project as much as possible, even though there may be some problems in getting the alignments right.”

“I think this project might very well be the motivating force for (a monorail system) to swing through the whole county,” Riley said. “We left with the idea, from my point of view, that we want the project to happen.”

Six Orange County cities have banded together to propose a central county monorail system linking Irvine, Costa Mesa, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Orange and Anaheim. They hope to have the project financed by private developers.

The airport monorail would link the new passenger terminal with twin, 23-story office towers planned by McDonnell Douglas Realty but which have not received final approvals from Irvine city officials.

Francois Badeau, TGI’s project development director, said Monday that the monorail alignment issue is not really a problem. “We’ve always had two alternate alignments, and we still do,” he said. “We will have to retrofit, but there are many ways to do it. Once the McDonnell Douglas project gets through its final reviews, we will start the monorail construction in mid-1990.”

Airport officials could not be reached for comment.

Asked if some recently completed portions of the $310-million airport expansion project would have to be torn up to accommodate the monorail now, Riley said:

“We’re not in that mode yet.”