O.C. Business Owners Call for Cargo Planes at Airport

With the slogan “Export packages, not jobs,” a new Orange County business group financed by United Parcel Service charged Monday that the ban on air-cargo flights at John Wayne Airport is hurting the local economy.

“It’s package discrimination,” said Jim Carter, president of Educalc in Laguna Beach. “This especially hurts mail-order businesses like mine,” said Carter, whose company is a supplier of calculators and related equipment.

UPS has requested one flight a day using a fully loaded Boeing 757. Such a flight would be among the noisiest at John Wayne.

Carter was one of half a dozen business and trade executives who said at a press conference in Irvine that they want “immediate relief” from the Orange County Board of Supervisors, which sets policy for county-owned John Wayne Airport.

“This is the only airport in the West that prohibits cargo flights,” said Scott Macdonald, communications director for the fledgling Competitive Alliance of Orange County, whose sole focus is air cargo.

Kenneth Churchill, public affairs manager for UPS and co-chair of the 140-member alliance, acknowledged that UPS helped form the group after receiving an increasing number of complaints about early deadlines for package pickups in Orange County.

The problem, Churchill said, is late-afternoon traffic in Orange County. Because of freeway congestion, he said, trucks have difficulty getting to the UPS facility at Ontario International Airport in time for a 7:30 p.m. flight out.

“There’s 1 1/2 to two hours of ‘sit’ time on the freeways,” Churchill said.

Several business executives said that forces them to stop processing orders for next-day delivery by 3 p.m., though companies elsewhere in the state are able to keep going for another two hours.

“We need an alternative to stay competitive,” said Peter Zomaya Jr., general manager of Memory Products and More, an Irvine supplier of computer disk drives and memory upgrades. “This is choking off some of our international business.”

Michael A. Cohen, director of pharmacy for Homedco, a Costa Mesa health-products company, said the early deadlines for parcel pickups hurt patients who need his company’s pharmaceuticals such as asthma medication.

“If we can’t promise next-day delivery, our business suffers,” he said. “It also puts a burden on the patient.”

Laura F. Maclellan, a Newport Beach banker also active in the Export Managers Assn. of California, raised a broader issue.

“About 50% of all the jobs created in California last year were from export-related activity,” she said. “Orange County could miss out if we don’t solve the air-cargo problem.”

UPS has hired the public relations firm of Woodward & McDowell and also employs former Irvine Co. official Jack Flannigan as a consultant. But alliance officials, who would not say how much money is being spent on the PR blitz, said they would be happy if any air-cargo carrier could get into John Wayne Airport.

The county is expected to finalize this week its environmental review of the UPS flight request.

That UPS is backing a publicity campaign now, Churchill said, is merely coincidence. Also coincidental, he said, is that it comes as the city of Newport Beach and a key citizens’ group are lobbying for civilian use of El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, partly to take expansion pressures off of John Wayne. El Toro is on the Pentagon’s list of military bases to be closed.

The new campaign follows a recent study by the Southern California Assn. of Governments, a regional planning agency, that concluded that Orange County generates 30% of the region’s air cargo but ships almost none of it through John Wayne Airport.

The ban on cargo flights resulted from a decision by county supervisors a decade ago to give passenger service preferential treatment in order to maximize use of the limited departures available under the airport’s strict noise standards. The preference was ratified in a 1985 court settlement between the county and the airport’s noise-sensitive neighbors, including the city of Newport Beach.

If the county grants UPS’s request, the airport would take a passenger flight away from one of the airlines now operating there. First on the list would be Dallas-based American Airlines, which with 20 flights a day is the busiest carrier.

Airport spokeswoman Courtney Wiercioch said UPS previously turned down a request to use a smaller, quieter aircraft. But UPS’s Churchill said doing so would not meet client needs.

Airlines serving John Wayne now haul some freight as space permits or truck it to other airports. They also offer counter-to-counter service for individual packages, but at rates more costly, business executives say, than those of UPS or other next-day delivery services.