Regional Airport Agency Founders

It was a fitting epitaph. When asked recently what had become of a 17-year-old agency created to resolve Southern California’s airport capacity woes, City Councilman Hal Bernson swung his right hand up and then down in a crash-and-burn motion.

The Southern California Regional Airport Authority has disappeared from the radar -- again. In 1985, and again in 1991, lawmakers concerned about the inevitability of an air-traffic jam tried to get the agency off the ground. Each time -- after the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of tax dollars -- infighting and the inability to reach consensus led to failure.

In March 2001, Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe resurrected the group for a third time. The five-member board hoped to bring together airlines, airport operators and communities to devise incentives for carriers to move services away from LAX.

The idea was to redistribute passengers among the region’s 11 airports to match projections made last year by the Southern California Assn. of Governments. The group also hoped to study how to move Orange County passengers and cargo to inland airports, using an elevated train or some other mass transit system.

Now, less than 18 months later, the authority is again on life support, suffering from parochialism and the untimely resignation of several of its members. A poorly written charter also held it back, sources say.

“Los Angeles County doesn’t show up for meetings, Los Angeles city isn’t participating and Riverside County has taken its toys and gone home,” said James Campbell, a spokesman for Orange County Supervisor Chuck Smith, who holds a seat on the airport authority. “You can’t have a viable entity without participation from all players at the table.”

The agency’s apparent demise underscores the difficulty the Southland’s diverse regions have had in preparing for the projected doubling of airline passengers and quadrupling of air cargo by 2025. Transportation planners worry that the group’s downfall will make it even tougher to forge a regional consensus.

Without a regional aviation plan to address the growth in passengers and cargo, Southern California risks losing valuable trade opportunities to other areas like Las Vegas, Phoenix and San Francisco, which have airport capacity to spare, experts say.

“Airports are the Achilles’ heel of Southern California’s global engagement,” said Steven Erie, a UC San Diego political science professor who is writing a book about the region’s infrastructure.

“We will face a 40% shortfall in airport capacity in this region by 2025 -- larger than any other region in the country. We need a regional approach more than anyone else. And what little regionalism we had is about to go the way of the dodo bird.”

In addition, Los Angeles Mayor James K. Hahn’s ambitious plan to cap traffic at Los Angeles International Airport at 78 million passengers a year -- part of a $9.6-billion proposal to modernize the aging facility -- rests on the assumption that lawmakers will persuade airports and constituents in their regions to accept more travelers.

Regional planners hoped to put millions of passengers at the former El Toro Marine base in Orange County. But that plan died when Orange County supervisors formally dropped a decade-long effort to build an airport after voters approved conversion of the 4,700-acre base into a so-called Great Park.

Other facilities expected to take up some slack from LAX include former Air Force bases such as March in Riverside County, Norton in San Bernardino County and George in Victorville. Airports in Ontario, Burbank, Palmdale and Long Beach, and John Wayne Airport in Orange County, were expected to take on additional passengers and cargo.

But many of these regional airports already have capacity constraints. And officials from areas with underused airfields are unwilling to take on other regions’ problems.

“We’re concentrating” on March Air Force Base, said Jim Venable, a county supervisor in Riverside. “We’re not concerned about Orange County and its little problems with El Toro. We’re not concerned with what’s going on with Los Angeles and with San Bernardino.”

Venable resigned from the regional authority board two months ago, saying it was “of no value at all.” He asked the group to refund $140,000 that Riverside County had paid in dues since the organization’s founding. The group has collected $757,000 in dues from its members since 1985, according to records kept by the Los Angeles County controller’s office.

Venable’s resignation from the agency is reminiscent of a decision by Orange County to leave the board in the mid-1980s after other members insisted that it expand John Wayne Airport, said a staff member who was present at the meetings.

Orange County returned in 1991 after the board agreed to give each voting member veto power over group decisions. Within two years, the group fell apart after Los Angeles County refused to fully participate, sources say.

The airport authority’s charter also hampered it, sources add. Representatives from Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties and the city of Los Angeles are members of the agency. Through what’s known as a joint-powers agreement, the agency holds the authority to build and operate airports.

But it lacks jurisdiction over existing airport operators, and the veto provided to each member makes the members more vulnerable to pressure from anti-expansion constituents.

The agency’s decline can also be traced, in part, to Knabe’s motivation for reconstituting the group, sources say. Knabe used the group to defeat former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan’s controversial $12-billion plan to expand LAX to accommodate 89 million passengers a year by 2015, critics say.

Supervisors from Los Angeles County, said UC San Diego’s Erie, discovered the group could be used “as leverage to deal with the LAX master plan and to encourage growth at Palmdale. “Once they achieved a cap at LAX,” Erie said, “they lost interest.”

Knabe refused repeated requests for an interview.

Los Angeles and Riverside counties weren’t the only agency members that lost interest. Los Angeles City Council President Alex Padilla left the board last winter, citing too many committee and nonprofit commitments, said David Gershwin, his press deputy.

Community members say that Hahn’s failure to fill the city’s spot conveyed the message that Los Angeles wasn’t interested in regional planning beyond its own facilities, which include LAX, Ontario International Airport and Palmdale Regional Airport.

That’s untrue, said Deputy Mayor Matt Middlebrook, who added that the mayor chose not to participate in the airport authority because he believes the Southern California Assn. of Governments is a more efficient and democratic body to compose a regional aviation plan.

But even the association’s leadership has acknowledged that it doesn’t have the power to see that airports take their predictions into consideration. And those who sit on the association’s 42-member aviation task force argue that the body’s size can be an impediment on issues that call for timely decision-making.

Regional airport authority officers dispute the perception that the board is on life support, saying it can carry on without Riverside County and the city of Los Angeles.

“With three members you can conduct business, but you cannot change the bylaws,” said Chief Executive Peggy Ducey.

The group’s remaining members are scheduled to take a trip to Germany in early November to view remote terminals that link outlying areas with Frankfurt International Airport. After that, the remaining board members will decide what to do next, Ducey said.

“I’m not going to say that the organization won’t go away. It may,” she said. “The organization can go dormant again, or it can continue to move toward a solution to the problem.”

Ultimately, the state may have to intervene to remove local interests from the regional aviation picture, as it did in San Diego, Erie said.

State legislation signed into law last fall created the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority to formulate a plan for the aging Lindbergh Field. The group is charged with submitting a ballot initiative that recommends an alternate site for the airport by November 2004 or November 2006.

Legislators worked to depoliticize the group, which must figure out how to accommodate a doubling of San Diego’s air traffic to 35 million passengers a year by 2030, by diversifying its appointees. Mayors in several San Diego County regions hold appointing power, as do Gov. Gray Davis and the county sheriff.

“This is a more promising model” than the Southern California airport authority, Erie said. “It really lessens the influence of local politics.”