Focus Shifts for Hearings on LAX Expansion Plan

The city spent more than six years and $78 million to put an expansion plan for Los Angeles International Airport on the table. But, with the final round of public hearings on the proposal set to begin this week, it is in an awkward position.

Laboriously constructed plans to accommodate more travelers--with 42 new gates, a perimeter ring road and a new terminal--have been dropped by Mayor James K. Hahn. Instead, he favors refocusing the airport renovation on security.

The city is pressing ahead with the hearings, even though proposals for a new, security-conscious LAX exist only in Hahn’s mind and in the preliminary concepts of airport planners.

That means that the public is being asked to offer suggestions, at six public hearings beginning Tuesday, without seeing a single picture, map, sketch or even basic description of the mayor’s concept.

The Hahn administration insists that offering a new approach at this stage is legitimate, because it merely builds upon a planning process that has been going on for years. To start over with an entirely new plan would force city officials, once again, to review a wide array of options, potentially delaying much-needed improvements at the airport, officials say.

But critics contend that this shortcut is misguided and risky--perhaps even illegal under the California Environmental Quality Act--because it will make substantial alterations without offering the public a fair chance to respond.

The state law is designed to ensure that the public knows all of the options and environmental consequences of a development proposal and can comment before government approval is granted.

The shortcut process proposed by Hahn reminds some critics of a time-honored tactic of lawmakers: gutting the contents of one bill and using the shell to speed passage of an unrelated piece of legislation.

“There’s nothing for [the public] to comment on,” said Councilwoman Ruth Galanter, an ardent foe of LAX expansion. “There is no proposal. What the mayor has outlined is a series of concepts.”

Instead of trying to hitch a new approach to the old one, Galanter said, the airport needs to withdraw the plan of former Mayor Richard Riordan and start again with a new proposal and a new analysis of environmental impacts.

“We want a plan we can see,” she said.

Hahn and LAX officials have said the new approach may involve construction of a passenger check-in, baggage-screening and security checkpoint east of the airport. The facility, possibly to be located somewhere near the San Diego Freeway, would be connected to the existing terminals by a high-speed people mover.

Attorney Says Approach Is a ‘Dangerous Strategy’

Such an approach could require a fundamental restructuring of how the airport functions. It also assumes that other Southern California airports--in Ontario, Orange County and elsewhere--will be able to shoulder much of any future increase in air traffic in the region.

Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said it is “a very dangerous strategy” for the city to try to graft Hahn’s alternative on to the environmental impact report that assesses the Riordan administration’s old plans for LAX.

“The events of Sept. 11 changed everything,” Reynolds said. “The LAX expansion plan on the table is politically obsolete and legally obsolete. We have a new mayor with a very different vision and a very different plan.”

The environmental lawyer said the situation requires “a reassessment of the future of LAX that goes beyond simply tacking on another alternative.”

But Hahn said he believes that his new approach can be considered within “the framework and the structure” of the existing environmental impact report without having to start the process from scratch.

Airport officials expect to produce a supplemental report on the modifications next summer. That study will include the same level of detail and analysis that went into the original one, said public interest lawyer Carlyle Hall Jr., a consultant to the airport on the issue.

Hall was hired by LAX officials five years ago. He had successfully delayed construction of the Century Freeway for nearly two decades until the state agreed to build thousands of housing units to replace homes destroyed by the project. He is supposed to help the airport avoid the kind of environmental and procedural pitfalls that bedeviled the freeway effort.

Hahn’s approach has political advantages because it moves the LAX planning process beyond the contentious issue of airport expansion, a political minefield that stymied Riordan’s plan for most of his time in office.

To put that issue to rest, Hahn made clear during his election campaign last spring that he intended to reject Riordan’s approach, which envisioned an airport serving up to 89 million passengers a year.

Instead, Hahn promised to limit LAX to 78 million annual passengers, or about 15% more than the all-time-high of 67 million passengers that the airport handled last year.

The chaotic state of aviation since the East Coast terrorist attacks has given the mayor even further justification for scrapping expansion plans.

The hijacking of four jetliners--which then slammed into New York’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field--fundamentally altered air travel, scared away passengers, led to massive industry layoffs and exposed the vulnerability of U.S. aviation and airports to terrorism. Predictions of rapid growth in air travel evaporated.

Instead, the focus at many American airports shifted overnight to the safety and security of the traveling public.

“I know the principles we want to achieve,” Hahn said in an interview. “How that actually works out on paper I’m going to leave up to the designers. But those principles are important: We want to put safety as the No. 1 design element.”

He said one of his goals would be to “try to eliminate the chaos of the arrival and drop-off traffic” in the central terminal area. “The coming and going would be a much more orderly and secure operation,” he said.

“You find a location off-site to do baggage screening and passenger screening. Once everyone has been screened [and] the luggage, carry-on and checked baggage has been screened, individuals can go to their gates in a secure mode of transport, like a people mover.”

Airport planners are looking closely at locating such a check-in facility somewhere in the area bounded by Arbor Vitae Street on the north, the Century Freeway on the south, La Cienega Boulevard on the east and Aviation Boulevard on the west. Although a ways from the airport, the area is close to freeways, remote airport parking lots and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Green Line.

“Airports of the 21st century will stress security and safety,” said Paul Haney, a spokesman for Los Angeles World Airports, the city agency that operates LAX.

He said “the design and details of the airport of the future” in Los Angeles will be determined in the months after the close of the public comment period Nov. 9.

Public Can Comment at Six Hearings

In the meantime, the six public hearings on the current master plan will give Southland residents additional opportunities to make their views known.

Although the emphasis has changed, LAX officials want to salvage as much of the environmental review process as possible. A small army of consultants has been working since 1995 to catalog the impact of airport expansion. The resulting 12,000-page document is so long it is available on a CD-ROM.

In the months ahead, airport officials must respond to more than 4,000 letters and 24,000 other comments on aspects of the environmental report. The comment process, which began with the release of the draft report in January, has been extended twice at Hahn’s request.

El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon praised Hahn for agreeing to limit the airport to 78 million annual passengers. But he remained cautious about Hahn’s nascent security reconstruction proposal, warning that the plan could be used as “some kind of facade” to continue with expansion. He said a cap on air traffic is meaningless unless growth of the airport’s runways, taxiways and gates is restricted.

Otherwise, it is impossible to limit passenger volume because the Federal Aviation Administration and the airlines control the number of flights, not the city, Gordon said.

Hahn made clear that he is not proposing additional passenger gates. “We don’t want to invite more traffic here,” he said.

However, he was quick to add: “We need to make sure our airport can handle the next generation of airplanes. So we need to configure airport gates differently.”

That’s a red flag to opponents of airport expansion like Gordon and Galanter, who are wary of any move to lengthen runways and taxiways or to alter gates to accommodate larger jets.

If any of those elements are part of the Hahn plan, Gordon vowed, “the opposition is going to be banging on the door again.”

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Times staff writers Matea Gold and Jennifer Oldham contributed to this report.