Airport Foes File Suit Over Study ‘Errors’

A regional government association that favors a commercial airport at the closed El Toro Marine base was sued Friday by a coalition of South County anti-airport cities for allegedly making “extraordinary errors” in an environmental impact report.

The El Toro Reuse Planning Authority filed suit in Superior Court against the Southern California Assn. of Governments, challenging the group’s recently adopted 2001 Regional Transportation Plan Update, a long-range document.

The authority accuses SCAG of violating the California Environmental Quality Act, and repeatedly misstating and underreporting “significant adverse environmental impacts” of its proposed projects.

ETRPA attorney Richard Jacobs said the plan measured effects of an airport at El Toro under an alternative analysis called a “no-project” alternative.

“It’s called a no-project alternative but they included El Toro,” Jacobs said. “Plus they made a series of other extraordinary errors.”

SCAG’s report calls for a Southern California regional airport system that would limit Los Angeles International Airport to 78 million passengers annually, John Wayne to 8.9 million and an El Toro airport to 30 million. Orange County’s plan calls for 28.8 million passengers a year at El Toro.

SCAG officials declined to comment on the lawsuit.

Last month, SCAG voted 38-2 in favor of limiting LAX to 78 million passengers a year, in opposition to a proposed LAX expansion.

“At LAX, our master plan calls for 89 million passengers a year,” said LAX spokeswoman Nancy Castles. Since 1994, the number of passengers moving through LAX has risen 20%, Castles said.

The dissenting votes came from Laguna Niguel Mayor Cathryn DeYoung, who opposes an El Toro airport, and Burbank City Councilwoman Stacey Murphy, who challenged the proposed limit of 9.4 million passengers a year at that city’s small airport as too high.

While SCAG has no direct authority over airport projects, it determines how and where federal money is spent for related improvements, such as roads and utilities. If an area is out of sync with SCAG’s plans, it could lose federal transportation dollars.

South County officials serving on SCAG’s board of directors also complained that the report assumed that John Wayne Airport could handle no more than 8.4 million passengers a year through 2015. John Wayne has an annual limit of 8.4 million passengers, but that limit expires Dec. 31, 2005. South County cities have urged that the cap at John Wayne be raised to 14 million passengers beginning in 2006.

Jacobs, the ETRPA attorney, said the report’s alleged errors were similar to mistakes found in Orange County’s environmental impact report for an El Toro airport, which also was the target of a lawsuit by the anti-airport coalition.

The coalition sued over Orange County’s first environmental review of El Toro on grounds similar to those in the lawsuit against SCAG. The suit was moved to San Diego County, where Superior Court Judge Judith McConnell has twice rejected the county’s air pollution analysis. The judge hasn’t ruled on the county’s most recent amendments, submitted earlier this year.