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Newshound (Newshound)
| | Posted on Tuesday, September 28, 2004 - 7:10 am: | |
Sept. 28-Airport struggling to stay under the cap,Daily Pilot
With passenger levels at John Wayne climbing every month, activists already are looking past 2015, when limits on travelers annually are scheduled to end.
Alicia Robinson
Daily Pilot
September 28, 2004
JOHN WAYNE AIRPORT — It's the nagging problem everyone's talking about but no one seems to know how to solve.
John Wayne Airport's passenger levels have soared every month for the last year as a result of increased capacity allowed by the settlement agreement that governs airport operations. August was its busiest month ever, with more than 872,000 people using the airport.
If the number of travelers using John Wayne continues to climb at such rates, the airport will reach its cap of 10.3 million passengers a year within the next two years, according to some airport activists.
Several people are pursuing solutions to what they admit is a regional problem, but some of them are flying under the radar for now.
A GROWING DEMAND
The airport, owned by Orange County, operates under a settlement agreement that caps the permitted number of flights and passengers and sets a curfew on flights to limit noise in surrounding residential areas. The agreement was renegotiated in 2003 to raise the cap from 8.4 million to 10.3 million annual passengers through 2011. The cap then becomes 10.8 million passengers a year until 2015.
The number of passengers coming through John Wayne Airport has been growing since October 2003, when airport officials doled out added capacity from the new cap to airlines.
"We have been setting more-or-less records on a monthly basis going back to late last year," airport spokesman Justin McCusker said. "When you're seeing increased levels, it's because the amended settlement agreement allowed the cap to move up."
Airport officials aren't speculating when the cap will be reached because it will depend on a number of issues, some of which are out of the airport's control, he said.
"Whether or not the capacity levels continue to increase is really a product of the airlines," he said. "It's whether or not people are flying."
After this month, the airport will have baseline numbers to compare passenger levels year to year under the 10.3-million cap.
REACHING THE CAP
The airport is likely to serve about 9.4 million passengers in 2004, and in 2005 officials will have to allocate passenger slots carefully to avoid bumping against the cap, Airport Working Group spokesman Tom Naughton said. The Airport Working Group was a party to the settlement agreements that govern the airport. The others are the city of Newport Beach, the county, the environmental group Stop Polluting Our Newport and the Federal Aviation Administration.
If the airport were to reach the cap before the end of a given year, it would have to be shut down until the year's end, Naughton said.
The dangers attending a limited supply are that travelers could see ticket prices increase with demand, and they may not be able to fly when they want to, Naughton said.
"You might call and say, 'I'd like a flight on Monday,' and they'd say, 'Sorry, we're all out of seats. How about Tuesday?'" he said. "You start to inconvenience the flying public."
Aside from the settlement agreement, John Wayne Airport has limited space to grow. Ongoing expansion to accommodate the higher cap — eight new security checkpoints opened in July, and longer-term plans are in place to expand terminal space — will nearly fill up the land the airport has available, Naughton said.
People are depending heavily on Los Angeles International Airport to handle the burden of increasing passenger loads bound for Orange County, and other solutions haven't gotten off the ground, he said.
"There's a lot of plans and a lot of money being spent on plans, but I don't see anything happening," he said.
WHERE TO GO NEXT
Solutions will be a long time coming, but officials and airport activists are working toward them, both behind the scenes and out in the open.
In the next few weeks, Newport Beach city officials will begin discussions with Orange County supervisors about four issues over which the city would like to have more control. One of those issues is John Wayne Airport.
The possibility of more city involvement in the airport and in other areas of county jurisdiction has been discussed over the last year, but not much progress was made, City Manager Homer Bludau said.
"John Wayne Airport certainly isn't in our jurisdiction, but it affects us very much, and we want to talk," he said. "Now we just need to find out whether [the supervisors] are interested enough when they hear some of the detail [on all four issues] to progress into serious talks."
Bludau said it will be several months before he can provide details on what the city is proposing, but keeping a tight hold on airport passenger levels will be a top priority for the city for at least the next decade.
"I don't think anybody wants to see the cap increase," he said. "The City Council didn't want to see the cap increase with the last agreement."
Hoping to address the transportation problem regionally, Los Angeles City Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski is pushing a plan to manage traffic at LAX that could include creating a regional airport authority, a body that would essentially force Southern California officials to come to the table and talk airports.
"The councilwoman recognized that we do need to have some sort of a regional solution," said David Kissinger, who is Miscikowski's airport-relations deputy. "Typically, state legislation would enable a regional authority that would require the local agencies to sit down and be a part of this regional authority."
A regional authority theoretically would have the power, for example, to resurrect the proposal for a commercial airport at the closed El Toro Marine Corps Air Station, an option Orange County voters nixed in 2002 when they voted to rezone the land as a park. Some Newport-Mesa activists have tenaciously held on to the El Toro airport idea.
"I don't see it as likely," Kissinger said. "My own personal view is that, today, if you wanted El Toro to happen, you would need federal intervention."
Hearings on Miscikowski's LAX plan are set to begin this week, and a state bill proposing the regional airport authority could happen later this year, Kissinger said.
Possibly the most novel proposal to relieve passenger overload at John Wayne came from longtime airport activist and retired aviation engineer Charles Griffin.
Griffin, one of nine Newport residents to have applied for a council seat vacated by Gary Adams this summer, said recently that he plans to travel to France later this month to suggest that plane manufacturer Airbus buy El Toro when it's auctioned off this fall and use it to accommodate the new, larger passenger plane the company is developing.
The new plane is too big to use at most conventional airport gates and terminals, he said.
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