"Opinion: Suddenly, LAX expansion is back on the table"

Sunday, August 19, 2007

Opinion
Suddenly, LAX expansion is back on the table
The Los Angeles (CA) Daily News


LAST week was a bad one for Los Angeles International Airport. 

Two customs computer glitches shut down the international terminal,
radiating travel trouble across the globe. Then, on Thursday, two commercial
jets came within ball-tossing distance of smashing into one another. 

These two stories might not seem related, but in fact they are: The glitch
and the close call are all solid indications of how LAX is operating at
sometimes dangerously high capacity. Yet, in the middle of the week, City
Hall quietly picked up an old, controversial plan to expand LAX. 

There's no question that operations and facilities at LAX need upgrading.
Reconstruction of the airport is important, but expansion is not. 

Of course, despite a decade of study and political manipulation that cost
tens of millions of dollars, no one in City Hall has ever dared call what
they're doing at LAX " expansion." That's because the public doesn't want a
bigger airport and even worse traffic congestion on the Westside. 

But tainted though the term "expansion" is, nothing else could describe City
Hall's latest effort to deceive the public about the nature of a new $1.2
billion concourse with 10 new passenger gates to accommodate supersize
airliners. 

Planes are getting bigger, and to stay competitive LAX must accommodate
them. Yet the plan isn't just to find a way to accommodate these new
super-jumbo jets, but to bring even more air traffic to LAX. 

Always more forthright than her colleagues, Councilwoman Janice Hahn stated
the truth: "We don't want (the airlines) to fly over us to other airports." 

But don't we? 

Isn't that what regionalization of air travel means? Isn't the goal to use
Ontario and Palmdale to a greater extent, to force Orange County to carry
its share of the burden of traffic and congestion? 

City Hall likes to pay lip service to regionalizing air traffic around the
Los Angeles Basin, just as it talks about solving our traffic and public
transit problems. 

But talk is cheap, and the action line shows the politicians lying about
what they are doing. They are so committed to LAX expansion and the
anticipated revenue and union jobs that feed the city's narrow political
system that they ignore the need to balance economics and politics with
making L.A. a better place to live and work. 

There's never been a real plan for regionalization of Los Angeles air
traffic, and the latest expansion plans are proof that there probably never
will be. 

It will take more than near collisions and breakdowns in handling travelers
efficiently to shake City Hall out of its dangerous obsession of airport
expansion. 

It will take you, the voters, to wake up from your sleep and hold the
politicians responsible for their failure to serve you.

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