Eighth in a series
[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]
Re “Even Though Commonly Owned, Ontario Airport and LAX Were Treated as Rivals”
When Richard Riordan was the Mayor of Los Angeles, he was not interested in Ontario becoming a second regional airport. Lip service was given, but there were no real plans.
Now if you are in San Francisco, for example, there is San Francisco Airport and Oakland Airport. Both have significant operating profiles. If you are in a metropolitan area with two major airports, it’s a familiar strategy. Not only does it relieve a burden, by spreading out, you spread the industrial base of the region.
Returning to our situation, if Ontario became a 30-million passenger airport rather than the 6 that it was, the potential for genuine industrial development in the Inland Empire would occur. And instead of having the workforce of Riverside-San Bernardino commuting to Los Angeles County and clogging our freeways, they would have jobs nearby. It would be a strategy to make the jobs having balance work right and reduce regional congestion. Balanced regional economic development, balanced aviation development, and less long-distance commuting.
We believed we had very compelling equity, very compelling economic arguments and environmental arguments.
But if you are Mayor Riordan of that day, all you are thinking is “LAX is our showcase airport. We are going to do it big.”
Ultimately, the strategy we adopted had two pieces. One was to defeat the LAX expansion at SCAG, the Southern California Assn. of Governments. In the Regional Transportation Plan SCAG adopts, there is an aviation element. The key portion of it concerns distribution of passenger and cargo demand to the various airports.
What this means is, in order to get federal money to invest in the expansion of LAX, you had to be in the RTP, the Regional Transportation Plan, with a level of activity at LAX that would justify the federal investment. SCAG is the MPO, the Metropolitan Planning Organization, for the six-county region. Any project that wants to get federal money has to be in SCAG’s Adopted Regional Transportation Plan.
The RTP consists primarily of knitting together the separate transportation plans from the six counties. But there are some key elements where SCAG does a regional assessment, and aviation is one.
We built a coalition at SCAG over the objections of the city of Los Angeles, the first time that ever had been done.
We defeated the city of L.A. at SCAG, and got the constrained 78-million passenger demand, constrained only in the sense of LAX’s ultimate 160 million passenger demand. While it was a 30 percent increase in the level of passengers at LAX at the time, it was tens of millions less than they needed to get federal money to pay for their expansion.
(To be continued)
