After more than 10 years, six plans and $150 million in development costs, Los Angeles International Airport is no closer to being modernized than when Richard Riordan was still mayor and L.A. had a pro football team.

Despite all the smiles and hugs at the Dec. 1 press conference announcing the settlement between Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, airport officials and community groups, the agreement puts most of the renovation efforts on hold indefinitely.

The only pieces to move forward are safety improvements to the south runway, a remodeling of the Tom Bradley International Terminal and the installation of baggage explosives detection devices.

“This is not enough of an investment into our airport going forward. What has been left off the table and not dealt with is an investment into the city and its economy,” said Joseph Czyzyk, chairman and chief executive of aviation service firm Mercury Air Group Inc. and a board member of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce. “Other major cities are making these investments. But here, the brakes are on.”

The brakes are the result of years of community mobilization against any attempt to expand the airport, along with the frequent turnover of elected officials that prevents consistent long-term public policy.

It hasn’t helped that the plans themselves contained so many weak points that they have been easy pickings for determined opponents.

“Until this agreement, there’s been a complete lack of trust in airport or city officials to keep this airport from growing further,” said Denny Schneider, a Westchester resident and vice president of the Alliance for a Regional Solution to Airport Congestion, which was one of the plaintiffs in the recent lawsuit against former Mayor James Hahn’s airport plan.

Villaraigosa said he is looking for “sensible improvements” that are acceptable to nearby residents, but aside from opposing Hahn’s $11 billion proposal, he has yet to offer specifics.

Disparate agendas


The clash over LAX reflects a broader frustration in getting major public works projects off the ground. Among the groups needed to make any plan work, the agendas are just too conflicting. Business interests want the economic growth that a bigger airport will bring, while nearby residents want to minimize airport noise, pollution and traffic in their backyards.

It wasn’t always this way. Almost a half-century ago, when LAX was initially expanded from a small general aviation air field into an international commercial airport, there was relatively little opposition.

“City fathers and airport officials simply went in and bought whole neighborhoods out, so there wouldn’t be any opposition,” said Steve Erie, professor of political science at the University of California San Diego who recently authored the book, “Globalizing L.A.”

“These days, that kind of mass eminent domain approach is off the table. You have to buy people out one at a time. That means you have an airport with residents encroached on three sides. Any move you make is bound to upset them.”

That’s why other major metropolitan areas have chosen to site new airports in more remote areas, like Denver did in the 1990s. But L.A. is so sprawled out that remote air fields are 40 miles or more away from downtown, with no easy way to get to them.

“The lack of fast reliable ground transportation is really the key. We have Palmdale and Ontario, but given current traffic conditions, they simply can’t draw on people outside their immediate vicinities,” Czyzyk said.

Airport officials did expand Ontario International Airport in the 1990s, but that facility now draws only 7 million passengers a year, a far cry from the 30 million that regional aviation backers would like to see. That would require additional terminals and ground transportation improvements that no one has been willing to fund.

And despite several attempts to get an international airport off the ground in Palmdale, only one commercial flight currently operates there, drawing a few hundred passengers each month.

“For better or for worse, it’s just not realistic to talk about diverting huge numbers of people from LAX to these outlying airports,” said Mike Boyd, founding principal of Boyd Group Inc., an Evergreen, Colo.-based aviation consulting firm.

Grandiose plans


That’s why so much time and attention has been focused on expanding LAX, dating back to the latter years of the Tom Bradley administration. But each proposal was met with intense opposition. By the time the mayor and council agreed on a plan and began to grapple with the opposition, the mayor and key council members were termed out of office. New players came in with different agendas.

Riordan’s two proposals were the first serious attempts at expanding LAX since the improvements of the early 1980s. He proposed adding a runway on either the north side or south side of the airport, a new terminal complex on the airport’s west side and a ring road around the entire complex to divert traffic away from Westchester and El Segundo.

These improvements would have allowed passenger counts to nearly double to 100 million a year, but the price-tag was hefty: at least $12 billion.

As expected, local residents griped about the additional runway and expanded 100 million annual passenger capacity. Even after Riordan dropped the runway, there was so much local opposition that the plan stalled of its own accord.

“Whatever else you want to say about the Riordan plan, at least it allowed for airport traffic to accommodate whatever the market would bear,” Czyzyk said.

Hahn came into office pledging to limit growth in passengers to 78.9 million a year, but the mayor soon had another focus. The Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks exposed glaring security flaws at all the nation’s airports. Hahn and his advisors decided that cars needed to be kept out of the central terminal area and that three of the terminals needed to be demolished and rebuilt from scratch.

Among other things, the Hahn plan called for a remote parking and check-in facility at Manchester Square, a block of land just off the San Diego (405) Freeway about 1.5 miles east of the central terminal area. Passengers would then be brought to terminals on a people mover.

Hahn’s proposal was criticized in a Rand Corp. report, which said that concentrating most airport passengers in that one area would actually increase the risk of casualties from a terrorist attack. The Manchester Square facility soon became the focal point for opposition.

Villaraigosa takes over


Instead of dropping Manchester Square, Hahn’s appointee to head the airport commission, attorney Ted Stein, stuck doggedly to it, alienating almost everybody in the process. (Stein was eventually forced to resign amid an investigation into “pay-to-play” contracting allegations at the airport.)

Business support for the Hahn plan was tepid at best, with the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp. agreeing only after behind-the-scenes arm-twisting. The L.A. Area Chamber concluded that the plan needed to be pared back.

The Hahn plan was headed for disaster until then-Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski came up with a compromise that separated out or “yellow-lighted” the Manchester Square proposal and several others for further study. It won council approval last December.

But residents in El Segundo, Westchester, Inglewood and Culver City still opposed the overall plan, saying they wanted the yellow-lighted projects taken off the table completely. They also sought stronger guarantees that passenger counts stay under 79 million per year. The residents filed suit in February to stop the Hahn plan.

Meanwhile, Villaraigosa campaigned against Hahn’s plan, casting one of two votes against it on the council. “When he got elected, everybody knew the Hahn plan was effectively dead,” said Brendan Huffman, legislative affairs director for the L.A. Area Chamber.

Once he took office, Villaraigosa moved to replace Hahn’s appointees to the airport commission, putting on an outspoken critic of the Hahn plan. Then he began negotiations with the plaintiff communities in the lawsuit.

The mayor has said repeatedly that he wants to make Los Angeles International Airport a “world-class airport for a world-class city.” But that vision does not include increasing the number of passengers or airplane gates.

Approval for even this scaled-back plan is no sure thing.

The airlines and the Federal Aviation Administration may challenge the proposal to reduce the number of gates once annual passenger counts top 79 million. And some local residents say reducing the number of gates won’t stop passenger growth and have called the agreement a “sellout” to airport interests.

About the only certainty: whatever new plan Villaraigosa and airport officials propose will encounter opposition. “It’s just a fact of life,” Erie said. “Airports in urban areas are constrained and it’s a very, very tough challenge to modernize them to keep up with the changing global marketplace.”