As Airport Vote Nears, Questions Divide Council

As the City Council prepares to vote this week on its most ambitious public works project and the largest remake of Los Angeles International Airport in its 75-year history, critical questions that have dogged the project for months are still unanswered.

The council is sure to debate these key issues when it takes up Mayor James K. Hahn’s modernization proposal on Tuesday. But it’s unlikely the issues will be settled before the vote. How they are resolved will ultimately determine if the project is built.

Among the major issues:

* It’s unclear if a proposal that splits projects into two phases is legal or whether it would invalidate the voluminous environmental studies. A lawsuit could place the entire proposal at risk.

* Hahn assured airport-area residents that his plan would hold LAX to 78 million annual passengers, but some studies have concluded that the proposal would allow up to 90 million travelers a year.

* Officials don’t know if the plan would make LAX, considered the state’s No. 1 terrorist target, more secure. The Rand Corp. found that the plan’s centerpiece, a central check-in center near the 405 Freeway, could make passengers more vulnerable to attack.

* The initial projects may not significantly ease traffic in and around the airport. Plans for a transit hub and a consolidated rental car center would remove only a tiny fraction of vehicles in the airport’s congested horseshoe-shaped roadway.

“Questions have been raised,” acknowledged Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, who worked with Hahn to devise a proposal that postpones the most controversial elements of the mayor’s plan. “But we’re trying to find a way through the politics to forge something that’s credible.”

Hahn defended his plan in an interview last week.

“This plan does what I said it would,” he said. “It allows us to control growth at LAX, it allows us to deal with pollution and traffic congestion, and I don’t think any plan has gotten more environmental review than this one has.”

4 Remain Undecided

The plan has been steadily gaining support at City Hall. Eight council members plan to vote “yes.” Four remain undecided and three are opposed. The 15-member council must muster 10 votes to pass the LAX proposal.

No one questions that something needs to be done at LAX, which passengers consistently rank as one of the nation’s worst airports. The city’s airport agency has spent 10 years and $130 million in an effort to devise a politically palatable modernization plan. The airport had its last face-lift before the 1984 Olympics.

Hahn scrapped an expansion plan put forward by his predecessor, Mayor Richard Riordan, in the fall of 2001 to try to build a consensus with surrounding communities. Residents, airlines and businesses had complained that they were shut out of the process.

Last spring, critics predicted that Hahn’s proposal would be dead on arrival at City Hall, citing its $9-billion price tag and a highly controversial plan to build a passenger check-in facility near the San Diego Freeway.

But an 11th-hour compromise in June between Hahn and Miscikowski, who represents airport-area residents, brought airlines and business groups on board. The proposal, written by Miscikowski, was designed to assure critics that the most controversial projects would not be built without further consideration.

The blueprint, contained in a separate planning document known as a “specific plan,” puts some projects in a first or “green light” phase and others into a second or “yellow light” phase.

The “green light” projects include moving the southernmost runway 55 feet closer to El Segundo and building a rental car center, an elevated people mover with a transit hub, an employee parking lot and more gates where airplanes park at the Tom Bradley International Terminal. Those projects would cost about $3 billion.

“Yellow light” projects include two new terminals, the passenger check-in center at Manchester Square in nearby Westchester, a second people mover line and the demolition of central parking garages and Terminals 1, 2 and 3. Those projects come in at about $8 billion.

If all the projects in the mayor’s plan were constructed, the total cost would come to $11 billion, $2 billion more than initial estimates.

Late last week, proponents and opponents were preparing for a showdown at City Hall. Opponents released a 12-page letter to the council from a Santa Monica-based law firm and warned that if council members failed to rework the plan, “they are going to get sued.”

Airport-area residents and Los Angeles County officials are concerned that the plan fails to ensure that the check-in center and the terminal demolitions won’t happen without further study.

“There’s no precedent in law for yellow-lighting something,” said Jan Chatten-Brown, an environmental attorney hired by residents, who drafted the letter to the council.

Miscikowski called her plan “legally defensible” and countered that it would require the “yellow light” projects to pass rigorous environmental, traffic and security studies.

The proposal has slowly won acceptance among City Council members, who want to get something started at the world’s fifth-busiest airport.

Councilman Martin Ludlow, who last week was undecided, said Friday that he planned to support the plan.

“Of all the evolving proposals, at the end of the day, I think Cindy’s proposal is the smartest move for the city right now,” he said. “Cindy is presenting a proposal that allows key modernization issues to be addressed but doesn’t take on colossal fights.”

The plan received the go-ahead from the city’s planning and airport commissions and two council committees earlier this year.

But several council members still have reservations about Miscikowski’s approach and have called for the city to eliminate the check-in facility and to redo the environmental studies without it. City attorneys say the new studies would take up to 30 months, while opponents say they could be redone in six months.

“I don’t believe in emperor’s-new-clothes style of government,” Councilman Jack Weiss said. “I think the council and the mayor need to be honest with the public and be forthright about what is actually being approved.”

Weiss has introduced a motion to kill the “yellow light” projects.

Opponents have also questioned whether Miscikowski’s plan would increase security at LAX. When Hahn introduced his plan in 2001, he said it would make LAX more secure by dispersing passengers among several facilities.

In an initial review, however, the Rand Corp. concluded that concentrating passengers at a central check-in facility could put them in greater danger. A more thorough Rand study on Hahn’s plan will not be completed until next year.

Miscikowski said that Rand would review each project in the plan before it is constructed to ensure that it is built in the most secure way.

Residents have also raised concerns about whether the plan would ease traffic. Two major “green light” projects -- a consolidated rental car center and a transit hub to link the Green Line light rail with the people mover -- would decrease traffic in the airport’s horseshoe-shaped roadway by 5.2% a year, airport agency statistics show.

Miscikowski said her plan required city officials to continually monitor traffic and that it would be adjusted to deal with congestion.

As late as Friday, Miscikowski’s aides were trying to bring detractors on board.

City officials met with El Segundo representatives Friday afternoon in an ongoing effort to draft a legally binding agreement that would attempt to hold LAX to 78 million annual passengers.

Legality Questioned

The Federal Aviation Administration, which would have to sign off on a deal between the cities of El Segundo and Los Angeles, has questioned whether it would be legal, saying airports are prohibited by federal law from capping capacity.

El Segundo and Los Angeles County have repeatedly voiced concerns that Hahn’s plan, which would decrease the number of gates where airplanes park, fails to restrain growth at LAX.

Several transportation analysts, including a Berkeley airport capacity expert and the Southern California Assn. of Governments, agree that Hahn’s plan could handle 90 million travelers a year.

Miscikowski countered that the specific plan requires the city to conduct yearly passenger counts at each gate. When the total approaches 78 million annual passengers a year, she said, city officials would study which projects are contributing to the increase.

Proponents of the plan were also marshaling their forces last week.

A partnership forged by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor announced it would hold a rally outside City Hall on Tuesday morning.

“If we do not move forward with this now, with these projects that nearly everyone agrees to,” said George Kieffer, the chamber’s chairman, “we’re going to delay these needed improvements, including safety improvements, for four years.”

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Times staff writer Jessica Garrison contributed to this report.