State Panel OKs Bill Exempting County From Law Limiting Airport Area Growth

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

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

“This is good news,” said Torrance Mayor Katy Geissert, whose city is seeking the exemption. “It’s a question of local control.”

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.

Written by state Sen. Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach), the measure requires comprehensive airport land-use plans to be drafted by June 30, 1991--except in Los Angeles County, which recently won an extension of its deadline to Jan. 1, 1992.

The law, as currently written, could have far-reaching effects on new development near airports in Los Angeles, Torrance, Hawthorne, Long Beach, El Monte, Santa Monica, Compton, La Verne, Burbank and Palmdale.

Without the exemption sought by Beverly, the existing law would enable Los Angeles County community groups to use the courts to halt 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 teeth--via the threat of resident lawsuits that would follow the deadline--to a state requirement for land-use planning around airports. The requirement has been in effect for 20 years but has resulted in land-use plans for only half of California’s 269 airports. Land-use plans have not been completed for any of Los Angeles County’s 17 airports.

Los Angeles County “is really abrogating its responsibility to come up with a plan,” Bergeson, the local government committee’s chairwoman, 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 this past week.

What riles many Los Angeles County cities is that in the county, the Legislature has designated the Regional Planning Commission as the airport planning agency.

The commission lacks the staff to handle the workload posed by planning land use around the county’s airports and is less responsive than cities to local conditions, city officials say.

“Not only are local officials more responsive to voters, but they also can move along more quickly,” Geissert said. “People here would be much better represented at Torrance City Hall than they would be at county offices downtown.”

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 the city of 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 also opposed to 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 past 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 this process occurring in Torrance has worried 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 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. Wednesday’s vote 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 hoped that a compromise will be worked out that gives airport land-use planning authority to some type of regional commission, one that could include representatives of cities.

Beverly said his preference would be to leave his bill intact, permanently exempting Los Angeles County from Bergeson’s law. But political realities, he indicated, may force him to consider compromises.

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