Airlines Group Official Backs LAX Expansion

The head of the powerful Air Transport Assn., which represents the nation’s airlines, on Tuesday forcefully endorsed the campaign to expand Los Angeles International Airport, while downplaying grumbling from some airlines that an unrelated wage dispute at the airport has hampered cooperation between the city and the air carriers.

The expansion effort, said association president and CEO Carol B. Hallett, “must move forward for Los Angeles to maintain its proper place in global trade and tourism.” Failure to do so, she added, would be “devastating not just for L.A., but for all of Southern California.”

Hallett said that while Los Angeles debates its multibillion-dollar airport expansion proposal--cost estimates for the project range from $8 billion to $12 billion--competitors in Seattle, Denver and San Francisco are moving ahead or have completed expansions. If Los Angeles does not keep pace, she warned, jobs and businesses will be lost, severely crimping the regional economy.

Hallett’s comments represented the strongest public endorsement to date by the airlines of LAX expansion plans. In many respects, they closely paralleled remarks by Mayor Richard Riordan, who in recent months has stepped up his support for the expansion and has touted it in speeches from Hong Kong to Westchester.

Hallett, speaking to a group of business and civic leaders at Los Angeles Town Hall, called on the city to rebuild a partnership that once existed between Los Angeles’ political leaders and the airlines. Working together, the airlines and city government built the airport and then expanded it in time for the 1984 Summer Olympics.

“We should look back to the future,” Hallett said. “We need to restart the old partnership.”

In recent years, however, that relationship has been strained time and again. Mayor Richard Riordan came to office in 1993 promising to hike landing fees at LAX, only to lose that battle with the airlines; more recently, he has publicly urged the airlines to hike wages for some LAX employees, arguing that voluntary application of the so-called living wage is both good business and sound morality.

That has angered some airline officials, particularly because Riordan simultaneously is asking them to back an expansion plan that will cost their companies billions of dollars. On Tuesday, Hallett ducked questions about the wage dispute, saying only that the airlines were waiting to see how the city would resolve the debate, but stressed that she did not believe that it would derail the expansion effort.

“It’s too important that we keep this master plan going forward,” she said, referring to the expansion blueprint.

Hallett did not mention the airlines’ squabbles with City Hall, and Noelia Rodriguez, press secretary to the mayor, welcomed the call for partnership in the airport expansion effort.

Stressing that the issues facing the city today are different from those in the days when Riordan was pushing for the landing-fee hike, Rodriguez added: “What’s good for the residents of Los Angeles ultimately is good for the airlines. This has to be a win-win partnership.”

The cooperation of the airlines is essential if LAX is to expand according to the master plan, which calls for the addition of gates and runways and would almost double the passenger capacity of the airport. That notion is fiercely resisted by some neighbors of the airport, however, and their council representative, Ruth Galanter, has waged a determined effort to scuttle it.

Galanter favors expansion of the region’s airport capacity but argues that it would be better to divert some of that traffic to Palmdale, where Los Angeles owns an airport. Palmdale officials also favor that plan, which they believe would stimulate growth in the area.

Although most members of the audience Tuesday focused on Hallett’s comments regarding LAX, she also used the occasion to blast the federal Department of Transportation’s proposal to regulate certain air fares in order to prevent larger airlines from engaging in “predatory pricing” intended to drive new airlines out of business.

Hallett strongly opposed that effort, saying it would produce the opposite results from those intended by the Department of Transportation.