"Corte Madera Valley taken off San Diego airport list"

Thursday, December 9, 2004

Corte Madera Valley taken off airport list 
By Jeff Ristine
The San Diego (CA) Union-Tribune


San Diego County's airport agency and its public advisory group have taken
steps to remove the Corte Madera Valley in East County and possibly other
remote sites from the running as candidates for a regional airport. 
 
The advisory group on Tuesday recommended that Corte Madera not be
considered in the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority's analysis of
possible sites to someday replace or augment Lindbergh Field. 

A panel majority said the site, adjacent to two prime wilderness areas,
offers no material benefits to overcome seemingly insurmountable hurdles
associated with developing a massive public facility on land partly within
the Cleveland National Forest. 

In separate action Monday, the agency's board of directors agreed to assess
distance and other "market realities" to shorten the list of nine possible
locations now in play. The focus will be on nonmilitary sites in East County
and Imperial County; one or more of them could be eliminated by February or
March. 

Tuesday's recommendation from the Public Working Group, a panel of about 30
aviation stakeholders involved in the screening since 2002, goes to the
nine-member authority board of directors in January. 

Corte Madera had emerged from a computer-based sweep of protected lands
excluded from a previous search. 

Board members said that while they considered Corte Madera highly unlikely
to merit serious consideration - it would take an act of Congress to make
the area available - the location should be screened by the same standards
applied to other prospective sites. 

In the next step in the process of elimination, agency staff members and
consultants will consider implications of distance and travel time from the
population and employment centers that would be served by a new airport. 

"Market reality" comes into play when planners try to determine how air
travelers and airlines would react to the location. The study also will
examine how the sites would tie into cargo distribution. 

With that information, the airport agency then will consider whether to set
criteria to exclude any site from further consideration - in essence,
whether the market realities of one or more sites contain the same fatal
flaws that have eliminated Oceanside, Ramona and Tijuana from consideration.


"At some point this board is going to have to bite the bullet and take
(more) sites off the list," said board member Mayor Mary Teresa Sessom of
Lemon Grove. 

The findings will be presented to an authority committee in January, then
move to the full board for action in February or March. The agency hopes to
identify a suitable location for a 3,000-acre, dual-runway airport early in
2006 and submit its choice to a countywide vote that November. 

The market-reality analysis will focus upon four of the nine locations under
review. 

One is a cluster of sites around Boulevard and Manzanita in East County,
referred to in airport studies as the "Campo Area," about 65 miles east of
downtown San Diego. The others are an area southeast of Borrego Springs,
nearly 100 miles away, the southwestern Imperial County desert and the
possible expansion of Lindbergh Field as an alternative to a new airport. 

Five military installations on the list of possible airport sites remain
excluded from any market analysis until next year, when the Department of
Defense identifies a new round of proposed base closures. 

Those sites are the Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, East Miramar, Camp
Pendleton, North Island Naval Air Station and the March Air Reserve Base in
Riverside County. 

Sites surviving the market-reality analysis face still more screening. In
this "second cut," consultants will analyze each site for problems posed by
weather conditions, the amount of environmental mitigation required and the
cost of water, sewer service and other infrastructure.


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