Major Hurdles for LAX Suits

As airport officials pull together hundreds of documents in response to a quartet of lawsuits challenging the city’s modernization plan for Los Angeles International Airport, environmental law experts say opponents face serious obstacles in their bid to halt the long-awaited overhaul.

Airport neighbors argue in litigation filed this month in Superior Court that environmental studies for the LAX plan understate how much noise, traffic and air pollution will be created and fail to deal with the effect on nearby communities. The City Council overwhelmingly approved these studies and the $11-billion plan last month.

Challenging environmental studies in court to try to block airport projects is a common tactic. Typically, the cases delay projects for years and add to their costs, experts say, but they rarely stop them.

“The usual thing around the country is these projects get built,” said Victor B. Flatt, an environmental law professor at the University of Houston. “It’s hard to derail them, because there are powerful interests that want them.”

Airport projects often move forward, legal experts said, because judges are reluctant to second-guess environmental studies.

“Cities start with a leg up in these cases,” said Sean Hecht, executive director of the UCLA Environmental Law Center. “The presumption is that cities have the power to have a fair amount of discretion in decision-making.”

The Times asked four environmental law experts to review the lawsuits filed by the city of El Segundo; a group of Southland residents; a coalition of homeowner associations; and Los Angeles County, which was joined by Inglewood and Culver City.

The lawsuits share a similar theme, claiming that the city violated state law by understating the airport’s passenger capacity, by ignoring public comments and by making last-minute changes without additional analysis. The suits ask the court to invalidate the council’s approval and bar any work until a more detailed study is completed.

To prevail under California law, opponents must show that the city based its decision on inaccurate and incomplete information, and failed to examine significant effects of the project.

Proving that Los Angeles used such information will be difficult, the legal experts said. Each side is likely to provide the court with data from its own experts.

“The courts tend to look at that and say, ‘That’s just a battle of experts,’ and the agency is entitled to some deference,” said Robert Verchick, an environmental law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.

But the LAX case is unusually complex. The 30,000-page state environmental study discusses four expansion alternatives, leaving city officials at somewhat of a disadvantage because there are many ways opponents can attack both the analysis and the process.

“There are so many issues here that seem to be at least potentially serious from a plaintiffs’ point of view that I would say they likely have some real hope” that the council’s decision will be overturned, Hecht said.

Opponents may also have an advantage, experts said, if they can persuade a judge that the city left information out of its environmental studies. The lawsuits, for example, note that the city failed to study the LAX project’s effects past 2015, even though construction is likely to continue after that year.

A second significant piece of missing information, litigants argue, involves additional analysis that they say the city should have conducted after it made 11th hour changes to the plan.

The foes’ cases are “definitely strengthened by an omission like that in the impact statement,” Verchick said.

To mollify critics, Mayor James K. Hahn modified his plan and placed projects into two phases.

A transit hub, an elevated tram, a consolidated rental car center and the relocation of the southernmost runway 55 feet closer to El Segundo were included in the first phase.

A second set of projects, which require further environmental, traffic and security review, include more controversial elements, among them a remote check-in center and demolition of three terminals.

California environmental law is stronger than a similar federal statute and gives opponents a second way to challenge the LAX plan: by attempting to show that the city airport agency could have selected another alternative.

For instance, the lawsuits argue that environmental studies fail to address the possibility of dispersing travelers to other airports or capping LAX capacity at 78.9 million annual passengers, measures that would lessen effects on surrounding communities.

But challengers may have a tough time convincing a judge that these alternatives are feasible, because LAX cannot force airlines to take service to other airports and federal law prohibits the airport agency from limiting passenger growth.

In all likelihood, experts say, opponents are relying as much on the extreme complexity of the litigation as the legal weight of their arguments. Officials have already spent 10 years and $147 million studying how to update LAX.

“Lawsuits by expansion opponents can sometimes succeed, even if they fail, because they can delay the expansion process and drive up expansion costs,” said Maureen Martin, a senior fellow for legal affairs at the Heartland Institute in Chicago.

The petitions “are extremely long and contain dense language and an abundance of acronyms,” Martin said. “This creates a daunting task for the judges unlucky enough to be assigned to the cases and slows down the review process -- which likely is one of the opponents’ goals.”

That strategy has worked elsewhere, although it hasn’t ultimately stopped construction.

During the last two decades, communities ringing airports in or near Seattle, Oakland, St. Louis, Dallas, Boston and Memphis, Tenn., among dozens of others, have sued over modernization plans.

In most of these cases, the airport neighbors filed their cases in state and federal courts and claimed that environmental reports did not adequately analyze the effects of passenger growth.

Expansion opponents hope that tying up airport plans in court will forestall development because environmental data may get stale, airlines may cancel service, the city may be unable to pay for the project or the proposal may lose political support.

In St. Louis they nearly “pulled it off because of 9/11,” said Mike Donatt, a spokesman for Lambert-St. Louis International Airport. “We already had approval and had broken ground, but if they had delayed approval and it coincided with 9/11, they might have stopped everything.”

Lawsuits claiming that the airport lacked the ability to override local zoning laws delayed construction on a new runway at Lambert for about a year, Donatt said.

In Washington state, airport-area cities’ lawsuits pushed back the completion date for a third runway at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport by about eight years.

Twenty-three lawsuits were filed over the project, and the runway cost jumped from $400 million to $1.1 billion, said Paige Miller, president of the Port of Seattle Commission, which runs the airport.

In Los Angeles, a judge is likely to consolidate the four cases filed here, experts say. There’s also a chance that opponents will withdraw their suits, if they reach a compromise with L.A. officials. The city continues to negotiate with El Segundo, Inglewood and the county.

The critical question now is whether the state court will bar the city from starting construction. Airport officials hope to begin work on the new southern runway in September.

Judges are often reluctant to get involved in public policy issues by blocking construction, said UCLA expert Hecht, but if they think they might ultimately ask the city to do additional analysis, they are likely to issue a restraining order.

“If the court finds anything wrong with the process,” he said, “the typical remedy is to rescind the approval and make the city do whatever is necessary to change the project.”