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Councilman urges cap on LAX to prevent runaway expansion
by Kevin Cody
Unless a cap is placed on passenger traffic at Los Angeles International Airport "LAX will continue to expand until it consumes the coastline," Hermosa Beach Councilman Sam Edgerton warned this week.
"LAX planners are making the same mistake they made in their 1978 plan, when they failed to impose a cap. They designed the airport for 40 million annual passengers. But now it has 64 million annual passengers," he noted.
Edgerton’s warning came in response to the recently released Draft Environmental Impact Statement/Environmental Impact Report for LAX’s proposed $12 billion expansion. He is Hermosa’s delegate to the LAX South Bay Task Force.
The new LAX report anticipates a doubling — to 157 million annually -- of the number of air travelers in the Los Angeles region by 2020.
Under the proposed expansion plan, LAX would absorb approximately 25 million of the anticipated 80 million increase.
The other 55 million additional passengers would travel through Orange County, Palmdale and San Bernadino airports, , according to the new environmental report.
But Edgerton and other critics don’t believe the neighboring airports will be capable of serving 55 million more passengers.
Airport planners have assumed that Orange County airports will serve an additional 21 million passengers annually by the year 2020, a 379 percent increase over its 1997 level. But Orange County’s John Wayne is already near its cap of 8.4 million passengers annually. And the report’s projection of at least 20 million passengers flying in and out of the former El Toro Marine Base is suspect because the airport isn’t built, and may never be, critics have said. Orange County residents voted last year to block development of the former Marine base as a commercial airport.
Airport critics contend that similar political and practical obstacles cast doubt on the planners’ assumption that the remaining 35 million increase in annual passengers will be serviced by other regional airports — principally Palmdale’s, Ontario’s and Burbank’s.
Edgerton expressed concern that if other airports fail to meet the planners’ passenger goals, LAX will be forced to serve those 50 million-plus passengers, just as it now serves 24 million more than it was designed to serve in 1978.
"That’s why we need a cap — to force the airlines to go elsewhere. And that’s why Los Angeles World Airports purchased the Palmdale airport in the ‘70s," he said.
He cited Washington D.C. as an example of a city that imposed a cap on its urban airport to force airlines to use an outlying airport.
"No one traveling to Washington D.C. wants to fly into Dulles, which is 25 miles outside of the city. They’d rather land in the city, at Ronald Reagan Airport [formerly National Airport]. But most travelers have to land at Dulles because there is a cap on passengers at Reagan. An urban airport can only get so big before you have to build another one," Edgerton said.
A public hearing on the LAX Draft EIS/EIR is scheduled for June 9 from noon to 7 p.m. at the Manhattan Beach Marriott, 1400 Parkview Ave., Manhattan Beach.
The 12,000-page LAX Draft EIS/EIR is available on the Internet at www.lax2015.org. Printed copies may be viewed at most City of Los Angeles libraries, including the San Pedro Regional library at 931 S. Gaffey St. It may also be viewed at the El Segundo Library at 111 W. Mariposa Ave., the Hawthorne Library at 12700 Grevillea Ave. and the Proud Bird Restaurant at 11022 Aviation Blvd., Los Angeles. ER