A committee assembled by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to promote flights outside of Los Angeles will meet later this month, and there could be an unpleasant item on the agenda: disbanding itself.

The Southern California Regional Airport Authority has been treading water for over a year, accomplishing little, and even some of its members believe it could be killed soon.

“We have to look at if it is even worthwhile to keep it going,” acknowledges Los Angeles County Supervisor Don Knabe, a director on the authority’s board. “Most of the reasons people got involved in this was not to push for more airport traffic, but to prevent additional airport traffic in their backyard. If that’s what’s happening, then I see it going away, probably in the next few months.”

The impotence of the group highlights the problems for so-called regionalization, the oft-touted strategy to relieve passenger-choked Los Angeles International Airport by expanding service at the region’s smaller airports.

More than 60 million passengers used LAX in 2006 – a total that towers over the counts of nearby airports. John Wayne Airport in Orange County, Bob Hope Airport in Burbank and Long Beach Airport combined do not get one-third as many travelers as LAX.

And the passenger – and cargo – count is projected to get higher. Air traffic in the region is expected to surge in the next two decades, reaching 170 million passengers by 2030. But with residents and businesses fed up with the congestion at the airport, there’s a general desire to limit LAX’s growth.

Villaraigosa has pledged to cap LAX’s travelers at 78 million, but the airports in Orange County, Burbank and Long Beach have restrictions on flights, passengers, noise or development, making expansion in the other airports difficult, if not impossible. Bob Hope Airport, for example, has an agreement with the city that prevents any new construction until at least 2015.

“The prospects of redistribution of traffic are not good,” said Jack Keady, a transportation consultant based in Playa del Rey. “Politicians are well-intentioned but underestimate the requirements for redistribution of traffic to any significant extent.”

Waning interest

To promote regionalization, Villaraigosa in 2006 revived the Southern California Regional Airport Authority, which had dissolved in 2003 due to inactivity.

But the committee has plodded along, meeting just once in the last 10 months, leading some to wonder if it will last much longer. The authority hopes to meet Jan. 31, but the agenda has not been set.

Besides Knabe, there are only two active voting members on the authority’s board: Los Angeles City Councilman Bill Rosendahl, the board’s chair, and Gary Ovitt, a supervisor in San Bernardino County.