The Mayor Who Rallied LAX Foes

On the first and third Tuesday evenings of each month, as he wields the gavel at City Council meetings, El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon deals mostly with such local concerns as where to put a skateboard park and what to do about leash-law violators.

But Gordon has spent many of his other evenings during the last couple of years on a collision course with Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan and his powerful allies. And Gordon--whose 16,000 constituents number but a tiny fraction of Riordan’s 3.8 million--is now a figure to be reckoned with.

Gordon has used his professional political skills to build a large, unusual alliance among urban, suburban and rural communities to oppose Riordan’s plan for a massive expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, which lies just across Imperial Highway from El Segundo’s northern boundary and its blocks of tidy homes, lush parks and well-regarded schools.

Two or three evenings a week, Gordon left his political mail and fund-raising firm’s offices a few blocks south of the airport and drove the rush hour-clogged freeways to Hemet or Upland, to Chino or Garden Grove.

Speaking calmly but forcefully to one local government session after another, Gordon got right to the point:

There is a better--and cheaper and faster--way to accommodate the air travel and cargo needs of the millions of new residents expected in the Inland Empire and other fast-growing places in the region, Gordon would say. There is a way to share the jobs and other economic benefits, as well as the burdens, of life near an airport.

Then he would lay out a plan to “constrain LAX to the capacity of its existing facilities” and spread the anticipated voluminous new passenger and air cargo demands among 11 other airports in the region.

In the small packet of materials Gordon would leave behind was a sample resolution opposing LAX expansion and backing a regional plan. All a governing board had to supply was a vote to join the Coalition for a Truly Regional Airport Plan. That coalition aims to build political sentiment to counter LAX expansion proponents, which include labor unions, the airlines and the air cargo industry.

“Mike traipsed all over the countryside on his own time, and at his own expense, knocking on doors and making friends and building allies,” said Dennis Zane, a former Santa Monica city councilman and the consultant hired by the El Segundo City Council to develop a strategy for fighting LAX expansion.

“He transformed what used to be a David and Goliath story into a Goliath and Goliath story,” Zane said. “When you get all [these other communities] together, it’s a formidable group, and they have to be taken seriously.”

Strong Response to Battle Call

By the time airport officials in Los Angeles released their $12-billion LAX Master Plan’s 12,000-page environmental impact report in mid-January, about 100 cities, counties, civic agencies and school districts, from Manhattan Beach to Riverside and beyond, had voted to join the coalition and oppose the LAX plan.

And Gordon and El Segundo, a prosperous, politically conservative and family-friendly town, were ready for the next phase of their battle against LAX, one that might well include lawsuits and take years to resolve.

“It’s a rarity for a small-town mayor to have a role in something like this,” Gordon said during a recent interview.

The battle began in 1996, when airport officials first indicated their desire to greatly increase cargo and passenger capacities--initially to accommodate up to 100 million passengers annually (about 65 million use the airport now) and roughly double the cargo volume. Plans call for lengthening runways but not adding any.

Those officials, noting the importance of LAX to El Segundo’s booming economy, say Gordon is leading his town to bite the hand that feeds it.

“I think he’s doing an incredible disservice, not only to El Segundo, but also the whole area,” said John J. Agoglia, president of the Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners. “He’s misinformed and unrealistic.”

LAX is where the airlines and the cargo companies want to be, and its growth will continue anyway--without better facilities and improved access roads--unless the expansion plan is approved, Agoglia said.

Yet even some who strongly disagree with Gordon find something to admire in his methods.

In putting together LAX expansion opponents and people who want the jobs expected to come with greater airport business near their own communities, Gordon has created “a coalition of NIMBYs [not in my backyard] and wannabes,” said UC San Diego political science professor Steven P. Erie.

An expert on the state’s infrastructure, Erie supports the proposed LAX expansion but says civic leaders throughout Southern California must develop a much broader approach to meet air commerce needs in the near future.

“We do need a regional debate, and Mike is to be congratulated for recognizing that,” said Erie, who credits Gordon and other LAX opponents with forcing airport officials to modestly scale back their plans and to figure on at least some growth at other airports.

Small communities such as El Segundo, where some voters still measure their politicians’ worth by how long they have lived in town and to what civic organizations they belong, might seem an unlikely cradle for a broad, regional debate.

Most meeting nights, Gordon--sipping Diet Coke from the center seat on the dais--and the four other council members listen to residents’ comments, issue commendations and tackle neighborhood development and traffic issues.

But they have increasingly focused on the LAX issue, which Gordon frequently refers to as “mortal combat.”

“This is about fighting for the very future of our city,” Gordon often says.

Airport officials accuse him of using the expansion to further his own political ambitions. Riordan said Gordon is missing a chance to work with Los Angeles to mitigate the expansion’s effects on El Segundo.

“It can’t be mitigated,” Gordon said.

Friends and allies in the airport fight all use the same adjectives to describe Gordon, 43, a large, bespectacled man with a thick, neatly trimmed shock of dark hair. They call him bright, articulate, methodical, focused--sometimes to the point of impatience--energetic and politically savvy.

“He was very persuasive,” Riverside County Supervisor Tom Mullen recalled of Gordon’s pitch, which resulted in the Board of Supervisors not only signing on with the coalition but also helping to sell the coalition’s plan to communities within the county.

Los Angeles Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, who has been pushing for the city to concentrate on developing its airports at Palmdale and Ontario instead of expanding LAX, describes Gordon as “a very well-controlled tiger.”

“He starts off cordial and respectful, but if somebody makes a statement he thinks is unfair or incorrect, he’s very forceful,” Galanter said. “He can’t be intimidated.”

El Segundo City Councilwoman Sandra Jacobs said Gordon has brought a high level of political sophistication to the debate, a quality that she said probably surprised Los Angeles officials.

“He’s given them a run for their money,” Jacobs said.

Politics has been Gordon’s business--and one of his passions--all his adult life.

Born in Lynwood and raised in La Mirada, Michael Patrick Gordon majored in political science at Cal State Fullerton. An internship with then-Assemblyman Bruce Young (D-Norwalk) led to a staff job after graduation, and Gordon was hooked.

In January 1983, at age 25, he became executive director of the California Democratic Party. He left that post after two years to co-found what has become one of the state’s best known political mail, research and fund-raising firms.

El Segundo-based Gordon and Schwenkmeyer Inc. counts among its clients California’s Democratic U.S. senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, and Rep. Jane Harman (D-Torrance). It also works with such organizations as the state Democratic Party, the California branch of the National Organization for Women and the United Farm Workers.

Gordon moved to El Segundo from the Westside in 1991. He was getting married for the second time and his bride, Denise, lobbied for a home in El Segundo, which she saw as an ideal place to raise a family.

Gordon quickly became a fan of the community. He joined the local Kiwanis Club, coached Bobby Sox softball and Little League baseball teams and took a seat on the board of the town’s Sister City Assn.

He put his political skills to work in helping the El Segundo Unified School District pass a bond measure and assisted a challenger’s successful run for the school board against two incumbents.

He ran for the City Council in 1996 and won election in the predominantly Republican town just as the Riordan administration was gearing up for LAX expansion. He and two other incumbents received additional four-year terms last spring, when no one filed to run against them, a first in the city’s 83-year history.

City Invests in Anti-Expansion Effort

In the spring of 1998, he persuaded his colleagues to spend city funds to fight the expansion and set about with consultant Zane to devise a strategy. (The city has spent $1.5 million so far and has earmarked up to $1 million more; few other cities have contributed money, prompting expansion supporters to question the depth of the coalition’s support.)

“We felt from the beginning that the traditional NIMBY argument was doomed. We had to demonstrate that there was an alternative. . . . We talked about the economic opportunities for other areas . . . and we came up with a regional plan that was [rooted in] better public policy,” Gordon said.

The effort got another boost last fall, when a study for the Southern California Assn. of Governments found that the area would derive the same economic benefits whether air commerce was concentrated at LAX or spread throughout the region.

Then, in the closing weeks of Harman’s tight race last fall against then-Rep. Steven T. Kuykendall (R-Rancho Palos Verdes), Gordon helped persuade her to oppose LAX expansion and support the coalition’s alternative. Kuykendall stayed on the fence, saying the issue needed more study.

Gordon and two other prominent LAX opponents--Galanter and community activist Robin Friedheim--then signed postcards contrasting Harman’s and Kuykendall’s LAX positions, which the Harman campaign sent to voters in hotbeds of anti-LAX sentiment: El Segundo, Westchester and Playa del Rey. Harman agrees with Gordon that the gambit helped secure her 4,452-vote victory over Kuykendall.

Harman’s opposition also gives expansion foes another ally in Washington (along with Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of Los Angeles), where the Federal Aviation Administration ultimately will have a say in the project and other federal agencies will help determine funding for access road improvements and other things.

Airport board leader Agoglia sees even more politics in Gordon’s motives for fighting the expansion.

“In his drive for higher office, he has focused on LAX as his pinata, his way of getting attention,” Agoglia said recently.

Gordon’s allies scoff at Agoglia’s assertion that political ambition is driving his campaign against the expansion.

Nonetheless, many who know Gordon cannot imagine that he won’t run for higher office one day. Some expect that he will try for a seat in the Legislature when California’s term-limits law forces out Assemblyman George Nakano (D-Torrance) in 2004 or state Sen. Debra Bowen (D-Marina del Rey) in 2006.

Gordon, whose mayoral title was conferred on him by fellow council members, is noncommittal on his future.

“Right now I’m busy doing my job as the mayor of this community,” he said.

“I have 3 1/2 years to go” on the City Council term, Gordon said. “Then, we’ll see.”