Chief of LAX a Calm Voice Amid Shouting Over Safety
If it’s not lost jobs and long lines, it’s canceled flights and banned cars. Air Force fighters scream overhead, escorting a jumbo jet back to the runway. And a simple pair of nail scissors is now viewed as a potential weapon.
Los Angeles International Airport has been the crucible of many of the most noticeable changes in Southern California since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Charged with mastering this harrowing new world and protecting one of the region’s most important economic engines is a once-obscure City Hall insider, lawyer and urban planner: Lydia Kennard.
The executive director of Los Angeles World Airports, a city agency, has been praised for responding with poise and a sure hand to the turbulence that has disrupted thousands of lives. She has been steadfast, in particular, about putting security ahead of other priorities.
That meant keeping private vehicles out of the airport’s central terminal area for more than five weeks, despite almost daily pleas from the airlines and many of the city’s political heavyweights to let the cars back in.
Kennard’s turn in the spotlight is not likely to end soon, as she pushes to regain equilibrium at LAX, redraws plans for a massive renovation project and, most important, tries to persuade the public it’s safe to fly.
The publicity-shy executive acknowledges her arrival on the city’s hottest hot seat.
“Before Sept. 11, our world at LAX was not easy, but I always took heart in the fact that I knew nothing about Rampart and my name wasn’t Bernard Parks,” Kennard, 47, said recently at a fund-raiser for a women’s group, referring to the city’s police chief and the LAPD division that was plagued by scandal. “But now it’s payback time--now I’m sure Bernard Parks is glad he knows nothing about LAX and his name isn’t Lydia Kennard.”
A Family With a Long History of Service
Gone are the days when the $231,000-a-year executive would go unrecognized at her local coffee shop. Now the servers greet her. It’s unlikely that other parents at her daughter’s school will ever again assume her job at the airport to be as a flight attendant.
Born into a family of African American groundbreakers, Kennard grew up in the Hollywood Hills and went on to earn a bachelor’s degree at Stanford, a master’s in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a law degree from Harvard.
Her entrepreneurial family also has a long history of public service. In 1957, her father, Robert Kennard, founded the oldest continuously operating African American architecture practice in the Western United States.
His firm’s portfolio included three parking structures at LAX, along with Carson City Hall and Civic Center, the trauma center at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center and several schools. Her brother William Kennard became the first African American to serve as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
“Lydia is her father’s child. She gets a lot of her toughness and certainly her competitive spirit in business from her dad,” said Stan Sanders, a lawyer who knew Robert Kennard. “It’s a close family. They’re all high achievers.”
Kennard began her decade of public service when she joined the city Planning Commission in 1991, where she served until 1993. Her background in planning and law prompted city officials to recruit her to the city agency that operates LAX in 1994.
Those who have worked with Kennard say her leadership in the weeks after the attacks exemplifies what’s well-known in prominent political and social circles: Her outward sense of ease seldom wavers.
“She’s always able to remain the most calm person in any room,” Mayor James K. Hahn said in a recent interview. “She’s unflappable. In the middle of a cyclone of activity, she remains the calm, steady voice.”
This voice is evident in extended workdays at LAX, where Kennard juggles nonstop requests from the FBI, Federal Aviation Administration and the Los Angeles Police Department. As Los Angeles World Airports’ executive director, she also must devote time to overseeing three other facilities--Ontario International, Van Nuys and Palmdale airports--and a $453-million budget.
Although the mounting stress often isn’t immediately apparent, it affects Kennard’s life in other ways. One day recently, she forgot to eat dinner; she forgot to eat breakfast. She finally had a doughnut from a mobile kitchen in an airport parking lot.
On Sept. 12, the new tension between aviation efficiency and security became obvious. In a meeting to plot the airport’s near future, Kennard was the only woman in a room full of law enforcement officials and airport executives.
Others wanted to use a waiver to override a new FAA security procedure that prohibited private cars from parking within 300 feet of terminal curbs. If they didn’t use the waiver, officials would have to rope off two-thirds of the parking spaces in garages at LAX.
Kennard worried that, without those parking spaces, the airport’s horseshoe-shaped access road would not be able to accommodate thousands of private vehicles.
“These guys assumed they were going to invoke the waiver,” Kennard recalled. “And I said, ‘No, no, no, it’s not time--we should wait.’ ”
Officials questioned her decision repeatedly in the days to come.
Michael DiGirolamo, the airport’s deputy director of operations, called the day LAX reopened and told Kennard he was going to allow private vehicles back into the central terminal area that afternoon.
“I said, ‘Who made that decision? Because it wasn’t me,’ ” Kennard recalled. “And again I said, ‘No, no, no.’ ”
The safety of passengers and employees is her No. 1 priority, Kennard said, adding, “One life is too valuable, in contrast to the convenience of parking curbside.”
DiGirolamo said the LAPD was pressuring him to reopen the access road, because the department was short on personnel necessary to keep it closed. He said the airlines were also unhappy with Kennard’s decision, believing that it inconvenienced passengers.
“She got some pretty strong-worded letters from several airlines,” DiGirolamo said. “There was quite a bit of pressure. And she stuck to her guns.”
A week later, the pressure to let the cars back in came from another direction--labor unions and airport concessionaires. They asserted that no other airport had closed its parking area and that the shutdown was costing them money and jobs.
Hahn, in turn, asked airport officials to work with the FAA to get the parking garages open, and people back to work, as soon as possible. But Kennard was steadfast in her decision.
“LAX is unlike any other airport,” she said, referring to the foiled plot to bomb it around New Year’s Day in 2000. “There’s no other airport under a direct terrorist threat.”
Airport commissioners concurred and decided Sept. 25 to keep the ban in place.
Kennard said she was “vindicated” several weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks when another FAA directive forced many other airports to close their parking areas and rethink how they directed vehicle traffic.
Restrictions on access to the central terminal area were extended again when the FBI rushed into an Airport Commission meeting Oct. 2. Federal agents provided information about a threat to LAX so specific that it was “bone-chilling,” Kennard said.
In all, her controversial decision remained in effect for 37 days. The airport’s access road reopened to private vehicles Oct. 20, with a traffic plan that still keeps those vehicles away from the curb.
The immediate consequence of her decisions weighs heavily on Kennard. When she decided that the airport agency’s financial problems required putting construction and remodeling work on hold, a contractor called to say that he would be forced to lay off part of his staff.
“I had to say to him, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have a choice,’ ” she said.
Yet Kennard has made such tough calls and, having been around contentious City Hall for a decade, made few apparent enemies.
“We’ve walked through the terminals together and a lot of people wave at her,” said Miguel Contreras, a former airport commissioner and now executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. “People at the ticketing counter, baggage handlers and skycaps all said, ‘Hi, Lydia.’ ”
Labor leaders appreciate Kennard, in particular, for her work to ensure that airport tenants pay a living wage, as required by city law.
Airport’s Financial Hit Also Poses Challenge
As hard as the week after the attacks was, the looming economic challenges make the future appear only more daunting. LAX lost more than $40 million in the weeks after Sept. 11. Thousands of airport and airline employees were furloughed. Sales at many airport shops are down at least 50%.
The collateral damage from an ailing LAX could be widespread. Studies have found that the airport powers a tenth of Southern California’s economy--moving 70 million passengers and 2.1 million tons of cargo a year. It generates more than 400,000 jobs and $60 billion in annual economic activity for the region, studies report.
Kennard must try to keep this economic engine firing, while redirecting a $12-billion modernization proposal for LAX. The airport agency hopes to shift the expansion plan to focus more intently on security, but it’s not clear that can be done quickly without short-circuiting the state’s environmental review process.
In that task, Kennard will again fall back on her training as a planner. She began her tenure at the airport agency in 1994 as a deputy executive director, when she led a $270-million project to build two new terminals and other additions at Ontario.
John J. Driscoll, the agency’s previous executive, then asked her to take over Mayor Richard Riordan’s controversial expansion plan. In 1999, Driscoll retired and Kennard was named acting executive director. Riordan made the promotion permanent in March 2000.
Kennard said she thought long and hard about taking the job.
“My mom said to me, ‘You have to take this job because they’ve never asked anyone like you before,’ ” Kennard recalled. “You don’t fit the profile. You’re not the right age, gender or ethnicity.’ ”
Indeed, only several women today operate major airports in the United States.
But it’s not tough to be a pioneer, Kennard says. She adds that operating four airports, navigating the complicated politics associated with the different agencies involved and promoting the master plan aren’t the hardest parts of her job either.
“What I learned from Sept. 11 was something I always knew,” Kennard said. “The hardest part is that we run a very dangerous business. And sometimes people get hurt.”
