Bill to Exempt County on Airport Growth Law Gains : Development: The legislation by state Sen. Robert G. Beverly has cleared a Senate panel. At issue is a requirement for land-use plans.

A state Senate panel has approved a bill that would exempt Los Angeles County from a law aimed at controlling growth around California’s airports.

The bill by Sen. Robert G. Beverly (R-Manhattan Beach) cleared the Senate Committee on Local Government last week on a 6-2 vote, backed by cities concerned that the law will diminish their planning powers.

At issue is a 5-month-old law designed to bridle growth near airports in the interests of air safety and minimizing the exposure of homes and businesses to aircraft noise.

The law, written by Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), requires that comprehensive airport land-use plans be drafted by June 30, 1991; Los Angeles County, however, recently won an extension to Jan. 1, 1992.

The law, as now written, could affect new development near airports in Los Angeles, Long Beach, Compton, Torrance, Hawthorne, El Monte, Santa Monica, La Verne, Burbank and Palmdale.

Without the exemption Beverly seeks, the law would enable Los Angeles County community groups to use the courts to stop growth within a mile of an airport’s runways if the area is not covered by an airport land-use plan by 1992.

The law seeks to give--through the threat of resident lawsuits that would come after the deadline--teeth to a state requirement for land-use planning around airports. The requirement has been in effect for 20 years, but there are land-use plans for only half of the 269 airports in the state. Land-use plans have not been completed for any of the 17 airports in Los Angeles County.

“I feel (Los Angeles County) is really abrogating its responsibility to come up with a plan,” Bergeson, chairwoman of the local government committee, said after casting one of the two votes against Beverly’s bill. “Land-use planning around airports is going to become increasingly important as air transportation continues to grow.”

Beverly, supported by the Los Angeles County branch of the League of California Cities, disagrees.

“Cities are just not going to accept that kind of zoning law being imposed on them,” he said after Wednesday’s vote.

What riles many Los Angeles County cities is that the Legislature has designated the Regional Planning Commission as the airport planning agency for Los Angeles County. The commission lacks the staff to handle the workload involved in planning land use around the county’s airports, and it is less responsive than cities to local conditions, city officials say.

The cities also argue that their airports, unlike those in other parts of the state, are already surrounded by development.

Not all of the county’s cities have lined up behind Beverly’s bill. A conspicuous dissenter is Los Angeles, which is concerned about urban development encroaching on the airport it plans to build in Palmdale.

“Without some sort of regional planning authority for airports, we run the risk of having incompatible land uses in close proximity to the planned Palmdale Airport,” said Norman Boyer, the city’s chief lobbyist in Sacramento.

Such arguments are echoed by the California Commission on Aviation and Airports, a legislative advisory panel that also opposes Beverly’s bill. The commission says encroaching development has played a key role in the closing of 18 of California’s publicly used airports in the last 10 years.

“Development occurs, complaints about safety and noise come up, and pretty soon you have a process that snowballs,” said Christopher Thompson, a consultant to the commission. “It’s a scenario we’ve seen played out over and over again.”

The prospect of seeing that process occur in Torrance worries many of the area’s pilots. A group of Torrance-based pilots sued the city last year to block a housing project on Lomita Boulevard beneath the airport’s departure flight pattern. The suit was dropped after Los Angeles County cities pressured the Legislature to delay implementation of the land-use requirement locally until 1992.

Beverly acknowledges that his bill may have to be amended to pass. The vote Wednesday was only its first hurdle: The measure must still clear the full Senate, make its way through the Assembly committee system and survive a vote in the lower chamber.

Bergeson said she hopes that legislators can work out a compromise that will give airport land-use planning authority to some type of regional commission, one that could include representatives of cities.

Beverly said he would prefer to see the bill stay intact, permanently exempting Los Angeles County from Bergeson’s law. But he indicated that political realities may force him to consider compromises.

“It’s got a long way to go,” Beverly said.