Seventh in a series
Re “We Changed Our Focus to the Skies”
[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]
After we were approached by El Segundo Mayor Mike Gordon, who opposed Mayor Riordan’s dramatic plan to expand LAX by virtually doubling the annual passenger capacity, our task was to determine if there were alternatives to LAX. If, indeed, we have growing market demand, where was growth going to be?
The answer turned out to be Palmdale and the Riverside-San Bernardino area, which had Ontario Airport, March and Palmer-Norton AFB, now called San Bernardino International.
We began snooping around the SCAG universe, the Southern California Assn. of Governments, and we came to be familiar with the computer modeling on the topic of Aviation Demand Distribution. The computer modeling was that if you constrained LAX, and that was the key question, where would demand go?
Would it leave the Basin Or would it go to some other airport? Looking for a sensible outcome, could those airports reasonably be expected to handle the increased demand?
It turned out that the airports I have mentioned would be able to handle the demand.
At that point, Mike Gordon and I began to organize a regional coalition largely built around the Inland Empire where they wanted their airports to have an opportunity to grow. They knew if LAX gobbled up all the demand, nothing would be left for their airports. Therefore, they would have little in the way of an industrial job base for the largely blue-collar workforce that lived out there.
Inland Empire Knew What It Needed
So this was not a difficult sell to the Inland Empire. They got it right away. “If LAX gobbled up the demand,” they told us, “we would be left high and dry with airports that used to be military bases and now are closed. These bases are a big opportunity for our future economy.”
Ontario Airport, by the way, was owned by the city of Los Angeles. Ontario was sold to the city in the early 1960s. The idea was, “we don’t really know how to run an airport. Let’s give it to the experts.”
Cliff Moore was the director of LAX at the time. He was very much into the idea of regionalizing the aviation demand. As time passed, Ontario had been neglected. New terminals had been built there. But the other steps necessary to accommodate demand had not been undertaken. I am talking about ground access improvements to Ontario and a policy on fees at the airport that would make Ontario competitive with LAX.
We believed that LAWA, Los Angeles World Airports, which ran LAX, should treat the two airports as a singular system, rather than as competitors. The problem was that they were forcing Ontario to charge much higher fees for aircraft landing there than at LAX, which made Ontario not competitive. If
they were to make shifts in their fee policy and costs were borne across the system, Ontario could be competitive if ground access were provided, particularly rail ground access.
But the attitude of Mayor Riordan’s administration was “forget it” as far as Ontario was concerned. There were not significant plans for Ontario to become a second regional airport.
(To be continued)
