Security Angle Brings Support for LAX Plan

The $9-billion proposal to renovate Los Angeles International Airport received the support Friday of the city’s top anti-terrorism official, John Miller, and City Councilman Greig Smith, both of whom said it would significantly improve security at the nation’s fifth-busiest airfield.

Smith became the second City Council member to endorse Mayor James K. Hahn’s modernization plan, after Councilwoman Janice Hahn, the mayor’s sister.

“This plan is the only plan that has come forward that finally addresses the security issue and protects the citizens of Los Angeles and the world,” Smith said.

Several council members have expressed concern about the plan’s cost and doubts about whether it would make LAX more secure, but Smith said he decided to support it based on a review he requested from the Los Angeles Police Department.

Miller, head of the LAPD’s counterterrorism bureau, said his office found that the modernization plan would “harden the target” against terrorists who might consider attacking LAX. Hahn’s plan would dramatically rework LAX by demolishing Terminals 1, 2 and 3; knocking down parking structures in the current central terminal area; building a passenger check-in center about a mile east of the airport; and moving sets of parallel runways on either side of the airfield farther apart.

By prohibiting cars from going to the terminals, the plan “vastly reduces the potential for a large vehicle bomb being used” at LAX, Miller said, disputing a recent report by Rand Corp. that suggested the plan might make LAX more vulnerable to terrorism by concentrating passengers at the central check-in facility.

Smith said he had minor concerns about the plan’s effect on traffic and having the city of Los Angeles bear the entire burden for accommodating the region’s growing air-traffic demand. And he is not sure about the proposal to tear down existing terminals, he said.

But Smith said he is willing to support the plan because he believes it is a better alternative than three expansion plans proposed by former Mayor Richard Riordan that are still under consideration.