Don’t Get Stuck in a Holding Pattern on Airport Issues

As consumers of air service, we want our airports to be convenient to our homes. But as inhabitants of a neighborhood, we don’t want an airport and its noisy planes too close by. So, often our own interests and desires are in conflict.

I may be dubious of proposals, for example, to expand Burbank airport. But I appreciate having to drive only seven miles to reach it, and I’m sorry that airlines, constraining traffic at the as-yet-unexpanded Burbank facility, sometimes charge more to fly out of it than they do LAX. LAX is 22 miles from my house, via the often-congested San Diego Freeway.

Such personal feelings, multiplied by millions of people, are behind an imbroglio of the first order--the debate over plans to expand airports in the metropolitan Los Angeles area to cope with a likely doubling of local air travel by 2020 to 160 million passengers a year.

It’s the same in Orange County. Many people are opposed to a new commercial airport at El Toro. But John Wayne Airport has a cap on its passenger capacity, and more and more Orange County residents must drive to LAX or Ontario. They can’t be wild about that.

Among interviews on the expansion proposals, I talked to Lydia Kennard, the able interim executive director of the four airports controlled by the city of Los Angeles: LAX, Ontario, Palmdale and Van Nuys.

Kennard emphasized what she called “the facts.” LAX, she said, “will grow whether we like it or not,” from 63 million passengers a year now to as many as 85 million, even without formally approved expansion. International travel will soar, and 400,000 jobs depend on a healthy, growing LAX.

She acknowledged that there are potential “undesirable impacts” from LAX expansion to a proposed annual 92 million passengers, plus 4.2 million tons of cargo, as compared to 2.1 million now.

The consequences of expansion include more noise, potentially diminished air quality and increased traffic, she said. “But we think we can solve those problems,” she added, with such expedients as less-polluting aircraft, soundproofing of homes, extension of the Green Line into the airport, expanded FlyAway bus service and an expressway off the San Diego Freeway linked to a new LAX ring road.

Kennard acknowledged that work on an environmental impact report has slipped so much that it now seems a decision on expansion won’t be possible until early 2001.

Even without lawsuits against expansion that opponents such as El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon vow will occur, this would put off a decision to the middle of the next Los Angeles mayoral campaign.

Election time is hardly a propitious moment to take up such a matter. So it is not too much to assume that whoever is the next mayor will have more to say about expansion than the present one, Richard Riordan.

I talked to five prospective mayoral candidates for their views: James Hahn, Steve Soboroff, Antonio Villaraigosa, Joel Wachs and Zev Yaroslavsky. Only Kathleen Connell was unavailable.

But even without her, it was obvious that there is a wide divergence among the possible candidates, with Hahn and Soboroff leaning toward expansion of LAX, Villaraigosa and Yaroslavsky toward a “regional” solution that puts greater emphasis on expanding other airports, and Wachs stressing the democratic process.

Full debate always seems the right thing to do. But some metro transportation projects have been debated or been tied up in court so long that nothing gets done. That, of course, amounts to a solution too, though not necessarily the best one.

In the San Fernando Valley, debate on Metro Rail routes lasted so long that it fortified the ultimately prevailing sentiment to stop the whole thing in North Hollywood.

With LAX, Burbank, El Toro and even Palmdale airports, we have to face the fact that a stalemate, especially if the courts are a factor, could last indefinitely, leaving matters up to the creeping de facto expansion that Kennard thinks would happen anyway.

Mark Pisano, executive director of the Southern California Assn. of Governments, however, suggests that doing things with little “fanfare” may not be all bad.

He noted that such major projects as harbor expansion, the Alameda Corridor rail route, recent Ontario Airport expansion, the Metrolink rail network and ongoing development of so-called “high occupancy vehicle” freeway lanes have been pursued “without a great deal of opposition or fanfare.”

“That’s the way things get done in today’s society,” he said.

One of the most outspoken opponents of LAX expansion, L.A. City Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, disagreed. She added happily that the whole matter will easily be mired in delay.

Before this happens, however, there may be a chance that commitment to transportation projects to get more people to the airports without their cars could create more popular support for expansion, particularly at LAX.

I talked to Mehdi Morshed, executive director of the California High Speed Rail Authority, which is now completing the draft of a plan for a $25-billion, 200 mph rail line from San Francisco and Sacramento through Los Angeles to Riverside and San Diego.

It sometimes seems fanciful to believe that the financing to build this will ever be approved, and, at best, it wouldn’t be completed, Morshed said, until 2016.

But, if it were accomplished, it could carry half the passengers between the state’s urban centers, and be a major means of putting passengers for national and international flights right into LAX, Palmdale and even March Field.

We probably have to be looking at such big plans, among all the little ones such as FlyAway service from new terminals. This area will continue to grow in population, and holding up everything, no matter how tempting, just won’t do.

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventures at (213) 237-7060, or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com.