Sixth in a series
Re “Mayor Antonio Was an Early Advocate for Clean Air”
[img]989|left|Denny Zane||no_popup[/img][Editor’s Note: For more than 30 years, Denny Zane, 63-year-old visionary-philosopher-politician-arch activist in Santa Monica, has been in the forefront of shaping and influencing public policy and environment-related projects. This is a first-person account of that journey. Summing up the way he has morphed through a series of (always-linked) career changes, he said: “I got into the habit of making a living by pursuing my personal political priorities.” Now concerned with mass transportation, accent on light rail, his address is movela.com]
What do I like about Antonio Villaraigosa, whom I have been collaborating with since the early 1990s?
“Antonio has been willing to think big and out of the box, and believing that taking risks to do the right thing is what a political leader should do — long before he was in office, and after he was elected, this is what he continued to do.
The third time he and I collaborated was on the expansion of LAX. At the time, I was working with Cliff Gladstein of Gladstein & Associates. Cliff is one of the great clear-air heroes in Southern California. His consulting firm works primarily on clean-air projects, and heavily on truck-related topics.
Cliff was the environmental advisor to Tom Hayden when Hayden was in the state Assembly. He co-wrote the ballot measure called the Big Green. When Prop. 40 passed — the measure that created term limits in California — every state office was covered except County Supervisors, oddly. Of course, it was sponsored by County Supervisor Pete Schabarum. He was shortening the terms of everybody but himself. One of the other pieces of that measure was dramatic cuts in the staffing budget for members of the state Legislature. So Cliff and others were laid off because of staff cuts. That was when he started a consulting practice.
Changing Directions
Cliff and I began working together after I left the Coalition for Clean Air, after the California Truck Working Group. We were doing constituency organizing around clean fuel vehicle legislation in support of the Air Resources Board zero-emission vehicle program.
At a point, we were approached by El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon. The mission in El Segundo was their opposition to Mayor Riordan’s dramatic expansion of LAX. It was not about expansion of the footprint of LAX. They wanted to expand runways and terminal capacities. The plan was to change the airport’s capacity from about 70 million passengers a year to, as I recall, about 130 million passengers a year. At the time, they were operating at 60 million passengers.
They had about 30 percent growth capacity at their current capacity. As a community that neighbors LAX, El Segundo was quite worried about the noise and traffic effects, and that was why they approached us.
For Cliff and me, our objective would always be to try to do the right thing. We would not do this unless we thought it made sense environmentally and because aviation was a such a key factor in the economy.
The question for us was: Are there alternatives to the expansion of LAX?
If, indeed, we have growing market demand, are there alternatives to LAX?
Where was growth going to be?
It turned out that in the Palmdale area there was significant population growth, but even more dramatically in the Riverside-San Bernardino area, and that area had Ontario Airport, March and Palmer-Norton AFB, now called San Bernardino International.
(To be continued)
