Battle Over LAX Expansion Leaves Behind Turbulence

Across Southern California, cities and counties are weighing major airport projects to link them to the global economy. But all of them are dwarfed by one battle whose outcome will ripple across the region and guide the Los Angeles area’s development for decades.

That debate focuses on the proposed expansion of Los Angeles International Airport, but its impact will touch residents and travelers from Palmdale to Newport Beach and Ontario to Burbank. It is a discussion, often a heated one, about jobs and the environment, traffic congestion and regional planning, growth and limits.

And beneath it lurks a single question: Can the airport handle the bulk of the expected explosion of demand as air traffic, particularly from Asia, increases by leaps and bounds in the coming decades?

For the moment, the question’s urgency has subsided because trade with Asia is depressed by that region’s deep economic problems. But once Asia rebounds and Los Angeles attempts to solidify its position as the Far East’s entry point into the United States, Southern California is poised to capture broadly expanded trade opportunities.

If, as Mayor Richard Riordan hopes, the airport is allowed to grow from a capacity of 60 million passengers a year to 98 million--and if the cargo capacity is similarly expanded--Southern California could net an additional 375,000 jobs. Some of those would be at the airport, but the vast majority would be in businesses that need quick access to faraway markets for their products. Even by the standards of big-city job creation, that is a staggering number with profound economic implications.

But it comes at a high price--literally and figuratively. The estimated cost of nearly doubling the airport runs from $8 billion to $12 billion, enough to make it the most expensive public works infrastructure project in the United States. Beyond that, those who live near the airport worry that life for them could become dirtier, louder and more inconvenient. And the jobs that the expanded airport would create might benefit residents of Los Angeles, Inglewood and El Segundo, but what of Palmdale, Riverside and south Orange County?

In fact, Palmdale is aggressively lobbying for an expansion of its airport, which is owned by the city of Los Angeles. Orange County is locked in debate over the future of the El Toro Marine base, which supporters hope to convert into an international commercial airport that could accommodate 25 million passengers a year.

That would make El Toro the second-largest airport in the region, but it would barely be one-quarter as large as an expanded Los Angeles airport. Even if every airport in Southern California that is considering expansion got all that regional planners believe it could handle, Los Angeles’ airport would still be home to nearly two-thirds of all of the region’s air traffic.

L.A.’s Messy Internal Politics

As a result, what makes the process of planning Southern California’s airport future especially tricky is that while the region’s future is at stake, the internal politics of Los Angeles are what principally govern the outcome. And Los Angeles politics are nothing if not messy.

Take the last month as just a small example. At Los Angeles’ airport, since the beginning of April, an internationally respected public relations agency was dropped from a $1.67-million contract and a second consultant quit; the city’s Airport Commission president was bumped aside and managed to take a rival commissioner with him; Riordan took an earful from Congresswoman Maxine Waters about the expansion effort; and the mayor tapped a Westside lawyer for some badly needed consulting help, only to be accused of cronyism for hiring a friend of his best friend.

Is this any way to plan a region’s future?

Few think so.

Rep. Ron Packard (R-Oceanside), whose district includes El Toro and the south Orange County cities most opposed to it becoming a commercial airport, for years has advocated creation of a regional master plan on aviation. So far, there has been little progress, Packard said, because “each county has their own airport authority and they all want a new airport.”

“They’re all doing their own thing, they’re not even consulting with each other, and then they come to us and say, ‘Will you help get the money for it, will you help get the approvals for it?’ ” Packard said. “I’m saying no, we’re going to come up with one master plan, and we’re going to have one good international airport instead of two or three or four that fail.”

For Packard and other opponents of the El Toro airport, that “one good international airport” is LAX.

Some see plenty of reasons why it should be.

Major Gateway to Asia

The Los Angeles airport today is one of the nation’s busiest and most important. The value of the cargo that passes through it exceeds that of any airport in the country. At a time when major airlines increasingly link up with one another in order to ship passengers and cargo around the world, LAX provides the largest concentration of airlines and airplanes anywhere west of Chicago.

It is the main airport point of entry into the United States from Asia, and it is a significant transfer point from overseas flights to domestic. It is also essentially San Diego’s link to abroad because that city--California’s second largest--has a tiny scrap of an airfield.

But Los Angeles International Airport is painfully crowded. It already operates well above its anticipated capacity, and it is straining to add more flights and gates. Traffic in the circle outside the terminals bumps and grinds, tying up travelers and spilling into nearby neighborhoods. In Inglewood, some residents complain that jet fuel occasionally ends up on their cars and lawns.

To those neighbors, a bigger airport seems unbearable.

“Marina del Rey is being killed by all this noise,” one man told Riordan when he toured the area last month. Seconds later, a jet leaving the airport roared overhead, putting pause to all conversation in the neighborhood. Two minutes after that came another one; and two minutes after that, still another.

What those neighbors and their council representative, Ruth Galanter, want is for Los Angeles to send its increased air traffic to other Southern California airports. That, they argue, would allow the region to collect all the economic benefit of increased air traffic but spread the burden around.

In fact, some of the region’s airports are expanding. The Ontario airport, owned by the city of Los Angeles, is adding gates and flights and expects to handle more than 15 million passengers a year sometime early next century. El Toro, if it is built, could absorb an estimated 20 million passengers a year by 2020.

But elsewhere, airport expansion is either bogged down in controversy or complicated by geography. Nowhere is that more true than in Palmdale.

In 1969, the Los Angeles Department of Airports bought 17,000 acres in Palmdale, figuring that growth in the region was headed that way and Los Angeles could get in on the ground floor with a major new airport. Those 17,000 acres dwarf Los Angeles’ airport, which covers about 3,500 acres--making it one of the nation’s smallest major airfields.

The growth, however, moved east, toward Ontario. Palmdale remains a long drive up a bad freeway from Los Angeles and its glut of air travelers. And the airlines have voted with their feet: Today, there are no commercial flights out of Palmdale.

In April, the most recent commercial airline to fly out of the airport canceled its service for lack of use. Mesa Air Group of New Mexico, which took over United Express service in 1993, had been shuttling passengers between Palmdale and Los Angeles four times a day on 19-seat planes, usually filling only half the seats.

Still, Palmdale officials believe that Los Angeles is missing an opportunity by failing to direct its energy toward expanding that airport.

“They are failing to recognize that there is going to be a need for another airport,” said Palmdale Councilman Terry Judge, adding that the Antelope and Santa Clarita valleys are growing at a tremendous rate. “We can only say, ‘We are here, why don’t you take advantage of what you bought and develop it?’ ”

In Palmdale, where Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, there is no opposition to the airport, Judge said.

Indeed, one point that Los Angeles supporters of the Palmdale alternative often cite is that it’s awfully rare to find a community wanting an international airport with all its attendant noise, traffic and pollution. If Palmdale residents want it, proponents say, give it to them quickly before they change their minds.

And Palmdale does want it.

“It just seems ridiculous that one airport has to commandeer all the business and not allow other communities to share in the growth,” Judge said. “Why would they want to keep stuffing airport expansion down the throats of Angelenos when there is so much space here?”

Rep. Buck McKeon, a Republican from Santa Clarita, echoes those sentiments, and notes that despite the complaints about Palmdale’s location, other remote airports have succeeded.

“They used to say who would go to Dulles,” McKeon said of the international airport in northern Virginia, about 25 miles from downtown Washington.

McKeon says the proposed $8-billion to $12-billion Los Angeles airport expansion would go much further building in the barren land of Palmdale rather than tearing down and rebuilding in the dense, populated neighborhoods of El Segundo. Some money, he suggested, could go toward widening the Antelope Valley Freeway and building a bullet train to make it more accessible.

McKeon acknowledges that Los Angeles fliers will probably never make the trek out to Palmdale. But what about the hundreds of thousands of people who live in the northern San Fernando Valley and Antelope Valley?

It sounds reasonable, but the airlines aren’t buying it. And the airlines ultimately have the last word. If they won’t fly to Palmdale, it doesn’t matter how nice the airport is--it still will be empty.

“Unfortunately, there is no market in Palmdale,” said Neil Bennett, western regional director for the Air Transport Assn., which represents the airlines. “We have looked and looked at Palmdale and it’s not very viable for us right now.”

Roger Cohen, the association’s chief guru on state and local government, shrugs and shakes his head at the mention of Palmdale.

“There is no market there,” he said bluntly. “This business can’t be shuffled around like a video game.”

A high-speed rail to Palmdale would make the airport expansion look like a minor matter. And Los Angeles’ record with rail construction is hardly one to inspire confidence.

“It makes no sense to be talking about building high-speed rails, to build trains to Palmdale when the community has made a conscious decision to stop building trains where there are people,” Cohen said.

Longtime Feud Over Burbank Airport

Elsewhere, the regional picture is bleak. March and Norton Air Force bases are so far away as to make the projected demand for them essentially nonexistent. John Wayne Airport in Newport Beach is under a court-imposed cap that limits its growth. Van Nuys Airport, owned by Los Angeles, is limited to general aviation and prohibited from serving any scheduled airlines, so it does not figure in the region’s overall cargo and passenger picture.

That essentially leaves Burbank, a small but bustling field that specializes in relatively short flights and is run by a board composed of Glendale, Pasadena and Burbank officials.

Since the mid-1990s, the airport has been locked in a costly legal battle with the city of Burbank over expansion. The feud goes back decades and even produced a Supreme Court ruling in 1973.

Burbank city leaders have argued that additional terminals will bring unacceptable levels of noise and traffic. They have also called for caps on flights and a curfew on takeoffs and landings at the airport from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Under the 1973 high court ruling, cities are not allowed to interfere with safety or airport operations.

Airport officials contend that passenger demand and airline route decisions govern the number of flights from the airport, not the size of the terminal. “Expansion of the airports is not an attempt to create demand,” said Tom Greer, executive director of Burbank airport. “The dilemma of airports is they get caught trying to defend expansion plans as if it created the demand.

“The best we can do as an airport proprietor is to forecast the demand for our service,” Greer said. “That demand is created by factors outside the airport itself. The economic prosperity that we as a region are looking at will generate a demand for air transportation. What we are trying to do and what LAX is trying to do is accommodate demand.”

And there, at least, the region is in agreement. Whatever Southern California airports do, it will probably not curb the interest in visiting the region or shipping goods here. In 1995, 74 million people landed or took off from one of the region’s airports. By 2020, one estimate suggests that 157 million will want to.

Federal officials hope to accommodate them without the rancor of a county-by-county, city-by-city airport fight. Whether they will succeed is another matter.

Susan Kurland, associate administrator for airports of the Federal Aviation Administration, said her agency always looks for regional solutions, and will attempt to do that in Southern California through an advisory group on Los Angeles airport expansion.

“We encourage appropriate sponsors such as metropolitan planning organizations to develop plans which meet immediate and future needs,” Kurland said. “This is a topic of great discussion in the region, what trade-offs need to be made.”

Times staff writers Andrew Blankstein and Martha Willman contributed to this story.

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Passenger Overload

About 157 million people per year will want to use Southern California’s airports by 2020, according to the Southern California Assn. of Governments. Even if the former El Toro Marine Corps Air Station in Orange County is converted into a commercial air-port, Los Angeles International will handle 60% of all passengers.

Annual Passenger Demand (in millions)

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1995 2020 LAX 53.9 94.2 El Toro 0 22.2 Ontario 6.4 15.3 Burbank 4.9 9.2 John Wayne 7.2 7.0 Long Beach 0.4 2.8 Norton 0 1.8 Point Mugu 0 1.8 Palm Springs 1.0 1.7 Others 0.1 1.4

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****

Airport Use

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1995 2020 LAX 72.9% 59.8% John Wayne/El Toro 9.7% 18.6% Ontario 8.7% 9.7% Burbank 6.6% 5.8% Others 2.1% 6.1%

*--*

Sources: Southern California Assn. of Governments, Los Angeles Airport master plan