El Segundo Sues L.A. Over Airport Work

In a move that heightens tensions between local cities big and small, El Segundo has filed a lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles, charging that the metropolis is underhandedly attempting to expand Los Angeles International Airport without securing the required environmental approvals.

El Segundo’s suit alleges that since Los Angeles’ master plan for airport expansion bogged down in community opposition, city officials have undertaken a series of smaller projects that increase airport activity, but fall below the radar screen of public scrutiny.

Several other small cities said Wednesday that they expect to join the lawsuit, which asks the Superior Court to require LAX to conduct environmental reviews before continuing with at least six projects the suit alleges add up to an illegal attempt to boost cargo and passenger volume at the airport.

Los Angeles is acting “behind closed doors, with a handful of officials making these decisions at the expense of all of us,” El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon charged at a news conference Wednesday. Held in a tiny park next to LAX’s north runway, the event featured Gordon and a dozen other local officials pledging to support the suit as jets thundered low overhead in preparing to land on the busiest travel day of the year.

The suit pits the tiny South Bay community, which has spearheaded efforts over the past couple of years to organize other cities to help combat LAX expansion, against America’s second-largest city. It also ratchets up the controversy over Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s expansion efforts, which despite years of work remain mired in political quicksand.

The resulting well-organized coalition of LAX expansion opponents is pushing for other airports, including those in Palmdale and in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, to absorb the bulk of the expected increase in airport demand over the next couple of decades.

Among the speakers at Wednesday’s news conference was influential U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who promised to broaden the expansion fight to Washington, and in particular, to the Federal Aviation Commission, which has some say in such matters.

Waters said she will “do whatever it takes to stop expansion. . . . I look forward to this fight.”

So beleaguered has the airport expansion campaign become that most observers no longer believe that Riordan will be able to win approval for the project before leaving office in 2001--a development with significant economic, environmental and political consequences for the region and its most prominent public official.

As a result, some airport expansion foes now accuse Riordan of trying to achieve through deceit what he has not been able to achieve politically: a significant increase in passenger and cargo traffic at LAX. Riordan and his aides deny any subterfuge, and emphasize that it is their job to make whatever improvements are needed to provide a safe, comfortable airport for the millions of passengers a year who use LAX.

The lawsuit lists a number of projects either approved or underway at the airport that proponents say are expansion masquerading as modernization. Among them: construction of commuter terminals, reconfiguration of some runways and taxiways, development of new cargo areas, expansion of the Tom Bradley International Terminal and renegotiations of operating agreements between various airlines and the airport.

Expansion opponents are not entirely united in the view that none of the projects should go forward. Some of the projects that the El Segundo lawsuit deplores have been supported by other expansion opponents. Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who represents the area around the airport and supports regional airport growth but opposes putting so much emphasis on LAX, supported one of the taxiway reconfigurations.

At the same time, Galanter said she agrees with El Segundo that some of the airport improvements are being made to allow for expansion--and that those developments violate state laws requiring that such projects be subjected to environmental review.

“I do agree that there’s this incremental growth going on,” Galanter said. “Here’s Mr. Hotshot lawyer [Riordan] saying, ‘What do you mean we have to do it within the law?’ Well, we have to do it within the law.”

Riordan and his top aides and appointees dismiss the criticism and say El Segundo and other expansion opponents have put them in an impossible situation.

Gordon’s argument is “nonsense and insulting,” said John Agoglia, a friend of Riordan and a former television executive who serves as president of the Airport Commission. “I get the impression that Mr. Gordon will not be happy until LAX is the world’s largest golf course.”

The work going on at LAX is intended to make the existing airport more convenient and accommodating, not to cover for a broader expansion effort, Agoglia said. The alternative, he added, would be a less comfortable and possibly less safe airport--an option that is unacceptable to the airport management or the city government.

Riordan agreed, saying the work at LAX is not masquerading for expansion but rather is overdue modernization.

Without it, Riordan said, “you’re going to have gridlock like you have on Christmas and Thanksgiving every day of the year.”

Moreover, he and others point out that the Riordan administration has been expending time and political capital on the so-called master plan for airport expansion for years. Why, they ask, would the administration have done that if it only intended to circumvent the plan anyway?

“We’re not trying to go around this [the master plan],” Riordan Chief of Staff Kelly Martin said. “But in the meantime, we have to run the airport.”

For Riordan, the proposed LAX expansion has been an on-again, off-again crusade. He rarely mentioned the idea in 1993, when he first ran for mayor. But it emerged as a major priority in his second term, in part because Riordan was impressed during a trip to Asia by Hong Kong’s new airport and the predictions of its economic importance to that part of the world.

Riordan returned from that trip energized about the prospects for LAX, which he and others see as essential to Southern California’s economic health in coming years. They contend that a massive expansion--estimates range from $10 billion to $12 billion--will spur job growth and prosperity throughout Los Angeles and surrounding areas.

But Riordan has struggled in trying to turn that vision into reality. Despite changing airport commissioners and, more recently, hiring a new airport director to replace one who retired, the master plan still is not complete, and its anticipated release has been pushed back time and again. Most recently, those delays have been caused by a change in state law that required the city to broaden its environmental analysis of the project.

Lengthy Process Is Ongoing

Now, officials say they hope to complete that analysis by late next summer. The public would then have several months to comment, after which airport staff would forward those comments, its responses and its recommendations to the Airport Commission and City Council for approval.

The problem with that timeline is that each stage can take months, sometimes even years. That means that, even if all goes well for expansion supporters, the issue will not reach its key political juncture--City Council consideration--until 2001, when the race for mayor will be in full swing. That means any chance the Riordan administration ever had to break ground on the expansion now appears to be gone, casting the project’s fate into the next term, when the new mayor’s position may be different from the current one.

With the clock thus running, some airport expansion supporters see the actions of Gordon and the El Segundo council as a stall, meant to limit Riordan’s role in the airport debate and instead turn it over to a candidate who might be more friendly to their interests.

Gordon, however, said his city is willing to duke it out with Riordan and his allies over the master plan--just not to sit back and watch the airport expand without that plan’s approval.

“If LAX continues down this road, they--one mayor, one Airport Commission, one airport department--will make this decision for the entire region,” he said. “There is a political process here, and they can’t be allowed to circumvent it.”