Texas Airport: Big Growth, Big Hassles

By RAY F. HERNDON

May 28, 1998 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

DALLAS —

If the two-airport system unfolds in Orange County the way it did in this city, then officials here have a message: Prosperity will be unparalleled but peace will be hard to come by.

Provided there’s a lesson to be learned from the experience at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and nearby Love Field--the dual airport system repeatedly touted as a model for Orange County--a major airport at El Toro Marine Corps Air Station would likely bring an explosion in employment and population. It would draw new businesses to Orange County like bees to honey. Tourism would be a major beneficiary, but other businesses would likely profit too.

There could also be wave upon wave of lawsuits. Some airport neighbors may be driven from their homes by noise. Airport passenger totals might quickly outgrow projections. And aircraft may be required to take off and land over communities where local politicians swore they wouldn’t.

No two communities are identical and it’s possible that Orange County’s experience may be entirely different from that of Dallas.

But those advising Orange County supervisors on how an airport at El Toro could be jointly operated with John Wayne Airport have repeatedly pointed to the DFW-Love Field experience as evidence that the two could serve the flying public safely and profitably.

Many in Dallas and in the surrounding communities--who have lived with such a system for more than two decades--believe the plan could revolutionize Orange County’s economy and usher it into the next century.

Some, however, are wondering why Orange County would want to do it. This, especially in view of a previously unpublished 50-year study of wind directions at El Toro that would seem to suggest that the county’s proposed takeoff and landing routes could affect more residential neighborhoods than anticipated.

Some Dallas area officials think there are good economic arguments for letting John Wayne’s current restrictions on total passengers, noise and nighttime operations expire in 2005, and allowing it to operate at full capacity--an option county planners have considered but found to be costly and especially disruptive for those communities already forced to contend with jet noise.

As one Dallas economist who specializes in airports said, “Building El Toro doesn’t make any sense to me. You’ve got LAX just down the road. What makes better economic sense is removing the limitations on John Wayne and letting it build itself out,” said Bernard L. “Bud” Weinstein, a North Texas University economist. “Chase out the general aviation guys. Send them to El Toro.”

Or, others say, Orange County should leave the 1985 court-sanctioned restrictions on John Wayne in place, continue to rely on LAX for international service, and consider other, more environmentally friendly types of economic development for El Toro.

Impressive Growth

By all accounts, DFW, the nation’s second-busiest airport, has been a catalyst for some of the most impressive employment and population growth in the U.S. since 1970, when construction of DFW got underway. Airport officials here talk about DFW as the “engine” of the region’s spectacular economic growth.

The number of jobs in the Metroplex, as the four-county region surrounding the airport is known, has soared more than 148%, according to the U. S. Department of Commerce. Nationally, employment over the same period grew 67%.

U. S. Census figures show that population in the same region, and over the same period (1970-1996) almost doubled--from 2.2 to 4.1 million--while that of the United States as a whole grew roughly 30%.

According to CIC Research Inc., a San Diego firm DFW hired to help update the airport’s long-range development plan, the direct and indirect economic benefits of DFW amounted to $10.8 billion in 1996. The firm said DFW generated 204,000 jobs--more than 50,000 at the airport alone. And those workers were paid $5.9 billion a year--an average of $29,000--in wages and salaries.

Beyond that, CIC said, there was a ripple effect on other local businesses--everything from banking to real estate to manufacturing--that pushed the total to nearly $11 billion.

Weinstein, a transplanted Washingtonian who has spent much of his 23 years in Dallas studying and writing about DFW’s economic impact, said those figures are perhaps “overly generous to the airport.” But he agreed that DFW is “a major economic asset of the North Texas region.”

It helped Dallas and Fort Worth avoid suffering as badly as some other Texas cities did in the regional recession triggered by the 1986 collapse in oil prices, he said. And, he said, it has played a significant role in luring more than 400 U. S. corporate headquarters that have relocated to the DFW area since the airport opened in 1974.

Exxon, J.C. Penney, American Airlines, Kimberley-Clark, Burlington Northern, Dresser Industries, Avatex and CompUSA are a few of the Fortune 500 firms that moved here, in part because of DFW.

One of the early corporate relocations involved a financial services firm that moved from South Bend, Ind., to Irving, Texas. Weinstein said that when asked why the firm had chosen Irving, its executives replied: “Have you ever tried to get anywhere from South Bend?” Anticipating the globalization of the world economy, the company’s board wanted ready access to an airport with good connections and frequent flights. “They said that DFW was the real draw,” Weinstein said.

William G. Moore, a former CEO of both Recognition International Inc. and USDATA Corp., is an airport booster who credits DFW with Dallas’ supplanting Boston as the nation’s No. 2 center for high-tech employment, behind the Silicon Valley.

As the headquarters of Texas Instruments and EDS, the firm that Ross Perot founded, Dallas has always been a factor in high technology, said Moore, now an executive with the Grayson Group, a consulting firm that works with Fortune 500 companies. But it has also become the nation’s telecommunications capital, and has a noteworthy software industry as well.

“Everything we ship goes by air--semiconductors, software and hardware, too,” said Moore. “Most high-tech companies do between one-third and half of their business offshore, so you really need to ship by air. And here you’ve got DFW, which gives you access to markets worldwide.”

In 1996, the latest year for which Commerce Department figures are available, more than $6.5-billion worth of high-tech equipment was imported or exported through DFW.

Like Weinstein, Moore thinks the airport is a major reason why so many high-tech firms have clustered in the DFW region. There are other reasons, to be sure: a tax structure that is attractive to corporations, a young and industrious work force, and a location near the center of the country. “But the airport would be twice as important as any of these other factors,” Moore said.

4 Cities Affected Most

Some of the biggest beneficiaries of the growth triggered by the airport are the four Texas cities on whose territory the airport was built. Most of the 60 million airline passengers now served annually by DFW would never know it, but their planes have, more often than not, descended through the airspace of Coppell, disembarked in terminals situated in Grapevine, picked up their rental cars in Euless and, if they were heading to Dallas, driven through Irving to get there.

Grapevine, located north and west of DFW’s terminal complex, had a population of only 7,049 in 1970, the year construction started. Grapevine has since grown to an estimated 36,450 residents, but it still has a small-town atmosphere and appearance not unlike Old Town Orange. Small clapboard homes with composition roofs line narrow streets, their lawns shaded by elms, live oaks and crepe myrtles.

William D. Tate has been the mayor of Grapevine every year of DFW’s existence, except three. Before he became mayor, he was a city councilman, and before that, he was the city attorney. The expertise he has developed in airport litigation prompted one group fighting the expansion of Seattle’s airport to try to hire him.

Initially, Tate was a booster of what then was the nation’s biggest airport.

But back in the mid-1970s, big wasn’t what it is today.

In 1975, its first full year of operation, DFW handled fewer than a thousand aircraft operations per day, and its annual passenger total was roughly 14.7 million--far less than El Toro is slated to handle under the “preferred alternative” selected by Orange County’s supervisors. Through the years, the daily aircraft operations have nearly tripled, and the number of passengers more than quadrupled to 60.1 million in 1997.

Although the noise had become a major nuisance in some nearby communities much earlier, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s, when DFW announced that it was adding an unforeseen major runway on the airport’s east side, that the surrounding cities went to court. Initially, there had been three runways, and that number had grown to six in the early 1980s. Now, the airport was definitely planning a seventh, and contemplating an eighth.

Unlike the first six runways, whose touch-down and lift-off points were nearly three miles from any dwellings, the seventh would end within a half-mile of one Irving residential neighborhood, and barely one mile from two others. The eighth runway would put landing and departing planes directly over an area of Grapevine that is on the National Register of Historic Places.

“The whole world sued to keep us from building the seventh runway,” said DFW Airport spokesman Joe M. Dealey Jr.

In a case that could signal what Irvine might expect if it tries to control El Toro’s destiny through annexation, as it has talked of doing, Grapevine won the point in Texas courts that a city has almost absolute sovereignty over its territory. But the airport, with the backing of the airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration launched a major lobbying campaign in Austin, the state capitol, and got DFW exempted from the laws defining municipal powers.

The federal courts, where Grapevine then took its fight, have “basically decided they don’t want to meddle with how you run an airport,” Mayor Tate of Grapevine said. “They say, ‘We’ll leave that to the FAA, because there are too many lives at stake and it’s too technical.”’ The trouble with that is that there are no checks and balances in dealing with the FAA, Tate said. “The FAA does the environmental studies that will determine your quality of life, they pay for them, and then they rule on their sufficiency.”

“They’re the judge, jury and hangman,” Tate said. “Until Congress takes the environmental part of it away from the FAA and gives it to the environmental protection folks [at the EPA], nothing’s going to change.”

Vacant Subdivision

DFW officials say they were exceptionally generous when indemnifying people whose homes were rendered uninhabitable by airport noise. One entire subdivision in Irving had to be bought out when Runway 7 was built, as were two neighborhoods farther away across a super highway.

All that’s left of the Harrington Heights subdivision today is a giant blue-and-orange Jungle Gym where children from the community’s 564 homes used to play. Scores of single family homes and apartments have been bulldozed and their debris carted away, leaving only the subdivision’s 14 paved streets and lots covered with prairie grass and buttercups.

Judging from the number of homeowners who accepted the airport’s terms (nearly half of the $300-million total cost of Runway 7 went for buyouts of 952 homes and 13 businesses, and the insulation of another 1,189 properties ineligible for buyouts) the offers seemed fair, officials said.

In one Irving neighborhood, roughly four blocks by four, there is but one lonesome home in the very middle of the development. Jim and Cindy Savage, the home’s owners, find themselves in a situation that many Californians have known.

Jim Savage, 48, said they bought their home at the peak of the Texas real estate market in 1983, and the airport’s best and final offer is $20,000 less than they still owe on their mortgage. So he and his 44-year-old wife and their five children are the last remaining residents in their neighborhood.

“I get so damn mad when I hear them talking about all the money they’ve got and how many millions they’ve spent on this runway and the neighborhood mitigation. All I’m asking is the balance of my mortgage and another $10,000 to help me get moved somewhere else,” said Savage, a software developer.

The Safety Issues

Savage has no idea whether the airport will ever buy them out on his terms, but he said he has little choice. He’s unwilling to stiff his mortgage holder, even though the sound of aircraft passing directly overhead at 400 to 500 feet leaves him sorely tempted at times.

“Their final deadline was March 31, but they just extended it again until Sept. 1. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.”

In Grapevine, where nearly 700 homes are eligible for some indemnification for projected airport noise from Runway 8, the mayor called the process unfair.

Unlike Irving, where the airport was forced to buy nearly 1,000 homes outright, Grapevine homeowners are only being offered a “voluntary buyout,” Mayor Tate said. “And they have to agree to accept the value the airport puts on their property even before they know what the appraised value is. If you don’t accept those terms, you get only mitigation money, which is 20% to 25% of your home’s value. You know, if your home was taken through condemnation, through eminent domain, both the federal and the state constitutions guarantee you the right to a trial by jury to set that value. So, it’s just not a fair process.”

Noise isn’t the only concern of the airport’s neighbors; safety, specifically the issue of falling debris, is another. Others also live in fear of plane crashes in neighborhoods, though that is an extremely rare occurrence.

Roger Nelson, 34, is the city manager of Grapevine. He vividly remembers the August 1985 crash of Delta Flight 191. The wide-bodied L-1011 was in its final approach to DFW when a powerful downdraft of wind slammed the airliner into the ground, smashing two automobiles on a highway that skirts DFW, before careening into a water tank on the airport proper, killing 130 people,

“The approach to Runway 8 runs right over our town, over an area that’s filled with historic homes. Delta 191 was at the altitude that planes will be flying over our Main Street. I just shudder to think what could happen if we had another such accident involving a plane landing on Runway 8,” Nelson said.

Sandy Cash, the 46-year-old deputy city manager of Irving, has been that city’s point man in dealings DFW since the mid-1980s. He, too, remembers when another Delta flight, three years to the month after Delta 191, crashed on takeoff at the Irving end of DFW, killing 14 people aboard.

Irving has been spared any serious incidents although Cash said “the damnedest things fall from airplanes all the time,” including cargo doors, engine cowlings, nuts and bolts, and blue ice from the chemical toilets. But, he said, “there’s a risk that one day one of these babies will crash, and the highest risk is on takeoff and landing.”

Which town happens to be in the landing or takeoff pattern changes with the direction of the wind, and in Orange County this could have major implications for Irvine.

As a rule, “aircraft are normally required to take off and land into the wind,” according to DFW’s Runway Use Plan.

If this were to apply in Orange County--where the issue of takeoff routes has been an ongoing controversy--it could be problematic.

A U.S. Weather Service analysis of 50 years’ worth of wind data from El Toro, from 1945 to 1995, shows that the wind regularly blows from the west from the beginning of March through the end of October, when it reverses direction and flows from the east until the end of February. This would suggest that most of the planes departing a commercial airport at El Toro would take off directly toward Irvine’s Woodbridge development, despite assurances to the contrary by the county Board of Supervisors.

The supervisors have pledged that most of the takeoffs would be in the opposite direction, over sparsely inhabited areas of Lake Forest and Foothill Ranch, or to the north. The supervisors, in fact, propose that there would be no takeoffs to the west.

But, said DFW spokesman Dealey, “Operationally, the FAA has much more authority over the way an airport works than any board of supervisors.”

As Grapevine’s mayor, Tate, put it: “Once the FAA builds it, they’re in absolute control.”

The Airlines’ Position

It’s clear that the airlines also have a lot to say.

One of the reports submitted to Orange County by its airport planners warns repeatedly that, while technically feasible, the airlines can be expected to fight plans for a two-airport system. Two close-by airports force the airlines to either make a choice and serve only one, or duplicate facilities only a few miles apart, boosting their costs.

Bob Crandall, who until his retirement last week from the chairmanship of American Airlines was one of the most powerful figures in U.S. aviation, was asked at his farewell news conference in Fort Worth about Orange County government’s plans to develop El Toro as a major international airport and limit John Wayne to short-haul flights.

“I think it’s very important for everyone to keep in mind: Governments make the rules, we play by them,” said Crandall.

On the other hand, airlines have, on more than one occasion, tried to block such two-airport scenarios.

Charles Gates, the aviation director for Austin, Texas, said both American and Continental Airlines adamantly opposed Austin’s leaving its old airport open--even for general aviation--when Austin elected to take over Bergstrom Air Force Base, and make it the city’s major commercial airport. And both airlines fought the city until it agreed to shut down the old airport.

American Airlines has also been lobbying and fighting to get Love Field closed for the past two decades. American’s ally in this fight, the city of Fort Worth, is waging another spirited court battle now to get the airport closed. As Crandall explains: “Many years ago, the airlines undertook very substantial financial commitments to build DFW on the basis of the promise that Love Field would not be a commercial airport. That was the deal. We can litigate until the cows come home, but that was and is the deal. We expect the city [of Dallas] to live with it.”

Some here think Orange County should consider the same thing, closing what would become the smaller airport in a two-airport scenario. Among them is Cash, the deputy Irving city manager who’s had a ringside seat for all of the legal scuffling over Dallas’ continued operation of Love Field.

Cash said that if John Wayne isn’t big enough, Orange County should build a bigger airport at El Toro and leave John Wayne to general aviation. “But I suspect that won’t happen, because all the businesses that have grown up around John Wayne would dry up. There’s a constituency there that doesn’t want that change.”

Weinstein, the University of North Texas economics professor, thinks Orange County should forget about an El Toro Airport, and allow John Wayne to operate without fetters. His biggest complaint with the Dallas-Fort Worth dual airport system is the lack of competition between DFW-based American Airlines and Love Field-based Southwest Airlines. Because of restrictions on Love Field, like those contemplated for John Wayne, Southwest has been unable to fly to destinations beyond the states bordering Texas, which left American--the dominant carrier at DFW--to pretty much name its price on flights beyond Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. The absence of head-to-head competition between Southwest and American has cost DFW passengers dearly, Weinstein argued.

Sen. Dick Shelby (R-Ala) agreed. Decrying the noncompetitive arrangement that forced Alabamans to pay roughly three times as much to fly to Dallas as it cost to fly roughly the same distance to Houston, Shelby got an amendment passed permitting flights from Love Field to Alabama and Mississippi as well.

For his part, Mayor Tate of Grapevine said Orange County would be better off looking at something other than a new airport for economic stimulus.

“All too often,” said Tate, “communities look at the dollars, the economics of these airports, and they don’t worry enough about the noise issue, the impacts on the ground, the impacts on the quality of life. And that’s wrong. Airplanes and metropolitan areas don’t blend good.

“Sure, it will provide some economic boost. But the question is: Is that the kind of economic growth you want?”

* PAST AND FUTURE: Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport will be the world’s busiest by 2000. A17

* EL TORO STUDY: O.C. Grand Jury report concludes county is complying with laws for base closures. B4

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

DFW International: Busy, Busier, Busiest?

By 2000, Dallas-Fort Worth Airport is expected to be the busiest in the world. From 2,300 to 2,500 flights take off or land on its seven runways daily. It’s the only airport in the world where four planes can land simultaneously. Because DFW operates in tandem with Dallas’ Love Field, Orange County’s consultants are fond of pointing at the DFW-Love experience as evidence that two airports close together can operate safely and profitably. Some growth would have occurred anyway, but experts say it was accelerated and magnified by DFW.

Cities linked by an airport

Residential, commercial and industrial development has stretched toward the airport from Fort Worth in the west and Dallas in the east, nearly joining the two cities.

Comparative Sizes

DFW airport: 30 square miles

El Toro MCAS: 7.34 square miles

City of Huntington Beach: 28 square miles

Airport Comparative Statistics for 1997

Longest runway

Dallas/Fort Worth: 13,400 ft.

Los Angeles International: 12,091 ft.

John Wayne: 5,700 ft.

Daily flights

Dallas/Fort Worth: 2,300

Los Angeles International: 2,141