"San Diego's airport site planning nears elimination round"

Sunday, August 24, 2003 

Airport site planning nears elimination round 
Group will hone criteria for judging 16 proposals 
By Jeff Ristine 
THE SAN DIEGO (CA) UNION-TRIBUNE


San Diego's airport-site tournament is heading into the playoffs. 

A group has been assembled to help the region meet future air-transportation
needs. The group, mulling options that reach from the desert to the sea,
will begin to eliminate the least workable ideas in a meeting this week. 

The 32-member Public Working Group will weigh topography, driving time,
noise, rare grasslands and other issues in trimming the 16 sites proposed to
replace or augment Lindbergh Field. 

After a meeting Tuesday and a September session, at least half the options
are expected to fall off the table. 

Airport consultants, members of the group and leaders of a new public
agency, the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, say it's hard to
overstate the importance of the effort. As Lindbergh Field's 614 acres
become increasingly unable to meet passenger and cargo demand, they say,
economic losses to the region could reach recession levels. 

"This is our last chance," said authority board Chairman Joseph Craver.
"I'll tell you for sure: We are not going to fail." 

The San Diego Association of Governments assembled the Public Working Group
in 2001 as a brain trust of stakeholders on the airport issue:
representatives of public agencies, the military, environmental and citizen
groups, business, aviation regulators and air-passenger and cargo carriers.
A neutral facilitator runs the meetings. 

Last month, the group reviewed data collected by consultants for each of the
sites, which include three outside San Diego County and seven at active
military installations. 

Tuesday, the group will discuss the criteria and thresholds a site will need
to remain on the list. 

The group is free to establish any cutoff. It could decide that some sites
are too far for most people to reach easily by car. Or it might try to
establish cost limits of acquiring and preparing a site and handling
environmental issues. 

Deleting specific sites will come later, when the group is expected to
settle upon an undetermined but manageable number of locations - likely five
to seven - for more detailed analysis. 

Ultimately, the Regional Airport Authority's board will present an option to
voters. A 2004 ballot measure has not been abandoned, but 2006 looks more
likely.

Options and scenarios

For now, there are 16 sites but 23 "scenarios" in play. 

The northern half of the site map has Camp Pendleton; a site west of Warner
Springs and east of Lake Henshaw; a spot in Ramona; an Oceanside location
encompassing its existing municipal airport; and a Carlsbad site
encompassing McClellan-Palomar Airport. 

In San Diego, the sites are Miramar Marine Corps Air Station; East Miramar,
also on the Marine base; plus an oceanic "floating" airport three to five
miles off Ocean Beach. 

On the southern half of the map are North Island Naval Air Station; the
National City bayfront near Interstate 5 and state Route 54; the central
portion of Coronado's the Silver Strand; another Coronado site encompassing
the Naval Communications Station and coastal salt marshes; and Otay Mesa
south of Brown Field. 

Outside the county: March Air Reserve Base near Riverside; a nondescript
desert site in southwestern Imperial County; and Tijuana's Rodriguez
International Airport. 

Each site has been evaluated on operational requirements, ground access,
environmental impacts and site development needs, giving the group some idea
of how hard each would be to build, how well it would serve the public and
how many people could be negatively affected by an airport. 

Seven two-site scenarios expand the options. 

Under some, Lindbergh Field would continue as a short-hop airport, for
flights 500 miles and less, while a North County site would handle longer
flights. 

In another, Lindbergh would become a destination for parking, drop-offs,
pickups and check-in - what planners are calling a "landside" facility -
with travelers transported through some as-yet unknown method to an
"airside" facility at North Island where the jets would come and go. Yet
another option: air operations at Lindbergh and North Island.

An unnatural selection

To illustrate the difficulty of the selection process, consider one
hypothetical checklist: 

Dismissing sites that would require more than 15,000 residents to be
relocated eliminates Oceanside and National City. 

Of the remaining sites, four would have significant obstructions from
mountains: McClellan-Palomar, Ramona, Otay Mesa and Warner Springs. Suppose
those, too, are cut. 

Of those still on the list, crossing out sites 45 minutes or more away from
at least half the county's population - an excessive distance by national
airport standards - would eliminate the Riverside County, desert, Camp
Pendleton and Tijuana sites. 

Suppose the group then eliminated sites requiring more than 1,000 acres of
construction on the ocean or San Diego Bay: off go National City bayfront,
the Silver Strand and the "floating" airport. 

Then suppose the group decides it wouldn't make sense to build an airport
requiring noise mitigation for more than 7,000 residents. That takes the
North Island and salt marsh/Naval Communication sites off the remainder of
the list. 

If more than 2,500 acres of environmental mitigation (wetlands, vernal
pools, rare grasslands and the like) are considered too much or too
expensive, East Miramar is out. 

And suppose, as a final criterion, the group sees little point in pursuing
the Miramar air station, given the historic unwillingness of the military to
abandon the site and the working group's decision that joint use won't work.


So what does that leave from the original list of 16 sites? 

Nothing at all.

Everything on the table

Crossing out options until none remains is an easy gimmick and perhaps
unduly pessimistic, but it illustrates the challenges facing the Public
Working Group and the Regional Airport Authority board of directors. 

"On an absolute basis, there is no 'best' site to recommend," said group
member John Chalker, executive director of a business and civic coalition
trying to promote consensus on an airport plan. "Every single site has got
problems associated with it. 

"It's all going to be on a relative basis, and you're going to get to that
conclusion through . . . a process of elimination. Part of what you're doing
is making sure that all possibilities and potential sites have been fairly
examined before they're discarded." 

That's why Ramona, for example, remains on the list in the face of
overwhelming opposition from residents and elected officials. 

An earlier list of 32 potential sites, whittled down in 2002, included a
dredge-and-fill proposal for Mission Bay, as well as the Rincon Indian
Reservation, Montgomery Field in Kearny Mesa, and sites in Torrey Pines and
Carmel Valley. 

But by deliberating over even seemingly ludicrous proposals, the working
group and authority hope to build credibility with the public. 

"The reason all that was on there is so that nobody can go back and say
there was an option that wasn't fully vetted," said William Lynch, one of
three executive members of the airport authority board. 

In contrast, Chalker said, previous airport siting exercises in San Diego
tended to focus on one location at a time. 

This time, analysts have been scrupulous in developing an apples-to-apples
comparison of the 16 sites. The map for each proposal shows an identical
site development area for each site (except North Island): two 12,000-foot
runways separated by at least 4,300 feet. 

Doing so results in designs taking out the Hotel del Coronado and Legoland
in Carlsbad, unpopular outcomes most agree won't happen. 

Site selection is subject to other twists and turns. 

The Public Working Group last year, as part of its initial site screening,
eliminated joint-use scenarios with the military. But Thella Bowens,
president and chief executive officer of the Regional Airport Authority,
said the board of directors could initiate such discussions with the
Pentagon. 

Options involving Tijuana-Rodriguez Airport, including an idea that calls
for crossovers to and from a U.S. "landside" facility, also are fraught with
unanswered questions. Angela Shafer-Payne, vice president of strategic
planning for the airport authority, said planners would need to develop a
method of moving between the two nations "different from the existing
border/customs structure." 

The authority board doesn't expect any trouble selling the public on the
need to look beyond Lindbergh Field for future air transportation needs. 

In the year 2030 alone, analysts have projected the county could sacrifice
$30 billion or more in potential - but unproduced - goods and services if
the regional economy becomes stifled by an increasingly inadequate
international airport. 

Xema Jacobson, a member of the authority board of directors, said the Public
Working Group's deliberations will be critical in presenting an airport
solution to the community. 

"I don't have any opinion on any of the sites, pro or con, at this point
because I'm going to let the process go through and keep an open mind,"
Jacobson said. "Then we'll go out and explain what our answer is."


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