Interpret JWA extension as you will; the council did

There are two ways we can look at the Newport Beach City Council’s

approval Tuesday of the latest edition of the John Wayne Airport cap.

We might feel gratitude and some measure of relief that JWA won’t

morph into LAX in the 10 years covered by the agreement. This is the

reaction expected of us -- not just to accept, but also to applaud.

Or else, we might stare up at an airliner flying over our house

and wonder how in the world we have been negotiated into a dozen more

noisy flights daily when we had the promise two years ago of

permanent help from a new airport in El Toro.

Of course, whichever position we take must be tempered by the

recognition that -- as that eminent philosopher Yogi Berra once said

-- “It ain’t over until it’s over.” And the cap derby ain’t over

until the Federal Aviation Administration checks in.

All of this makes me long for the good old days when Dennis O’Neil

and Norma Glover were telling a Pilot reporter that they didn’t

expect a challenge to the cap agreement signed last June with the

county and, if one were to come, their lawyers had assured them the

city would prevail.

That was Agreement No. 1, in which we took our first hit.

Since 1985, passenger volume at JWA has been capped at 8.4 million

a year, noisiest flights at 73 a day and gates at 14. Under the new

agreement negotiated with the county, which we were assured wouldn’t

be challenged, those figures went up to 9.8 million passengers, 85

flights and 18 gates.

Now comes Agreement No. 2 -- responding to pressure from the

airlines -- with 10.8 million passengers, 85 flights and 20 gates.

The last shoe to drop, at least for this round, will be the

approval of the FAA.

Newport Beach officials, who have been working this territory

since about six months before the Measure W election, say we’re very

fortunate to be given this degree of protection, which resulted from

years of hard work on the part of City Council and staff members.

Some of the less grateful say that if the council had put this

degree of effort into defeating Measure W, we wouldn’t be sweating

out flight caps at JWA now.

Some of the downright ungrateful say we would prefer to take our

chances in court rather than allow the substantial increases

permitted under the new agreements.

So we need a reality check. Placing blame for the El Toro failure

-- a sport in which I admit complicity -- is no longer very useful.

Neither is self-congratulations.

Given the situation in which we now find ourselves, what, if any,

are our options? There are really only two:

1. Drawing a concession line in the sand and calling off

negotiations if it is crossed, leaving the current numbers in place,

and waiting for an inevitable lawsuit from the airlines and action by

the FAA when the present cap expires in 2005; or

2. Making the best deal we can under the circumstances.

That, it appears, is what has been done.

That said, I wish the self-congratulations that pervaded the City

Council meeting Tuesday evening might have been a little less

strident.

Perhaps they wouldn’t have been so irritating if the council

members hadn’t spent so much time telling us that it isn’t going to

hurt.

Glover, for example, said the council wouldn’t be recommending

modifications to the settlement agreement “unless we were convinced

that those changes would not adversely impact residents.” Earlier in

the day, she told the county Board of Supervisors that she was

“confident the increases in passengers and flights will not have

significant noise and traffic impacts.”

If she is saying, as she seems to be, that an increase of 12 noisy

flights a day out of JWA won’t make communication impossible on my

patio about 20% more often than current flights do, she’s welcome to

come over and check it out.

So is Councilman Gary Proctor, who called these considerable

changes “tweaking.”

Then-Mayor Tod Ridgeway made the quite remarkable case that the

new agreement could actually cut down the number of flights with math

so creative that one wished it might have been employed in the fight

for El Toro.

All of this would have been much more palatable for the

nonbelievers if one council member had just played it straight and

said:

“Look, we made a decision a couple of years ago to go for a new

cap agreement at John Wayne rather than an airport at El Toro because

we were afraid if we waited until El Toro was lost, we might never

get the cap. You might not agree with that decision, but that’s what

we did. We think it was the right choice, but it left us in a box

that we’re getting out of as best we can. For us to do that, you’re

going to have to put up with more noise and more disruptions, but we

think the alternative is much worse.”

The comment that seemed most inappropriate to me came when Glover

thanked Rep. Chris Cox in the same sentence with the Airport Working

Group. The working group, for all its internal problems, worked very

hard for many years to get an airport at El Toro. Cox worked equally

hard for equally long -- and mostly secretly -- to prevent it from

happening.

He has since turned what should have been a liability into an

asset, most recently by telling us in a bylined Thanksgiving column

in the Pilot that we should count among our blessings his work on

behalf of the JWA cap.

Only four speakers came to the podium to comment on the agreement,

but I thought that one of them -- a woman from Corona del Mar whose

name I missed -- made the most sense all evening. She told the fable

of the frog who, if dropped in hot water, leaps out, but if immersed

in cold water that is slowly heated stays in the pot until he is

boiled.

“That,” she said, “seems to me what is happening here. We keep

adjusting to these incremental increases to the gradual destruction

of Newport Beach.”

The people on the dais weren’t listening. They dismissed her

politely and went back to the business of the evening. Voting for the

agreement. Unanimously.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.