San Diego Is Stuck on the Wings of a Dilemma

SAN DIEGO — As regional airport planners ponder the demise of the El Toro airport plan, officials here are hip deep in the latest chapter of a decades-old struggle to replace the city’s tiny international airport.

The controversy over building an airport at the former El Toro Marine base in Orange County was intense. But it was a flap-come-lately compared to the debate about Lindbergh Field.

For more than 40 years, officials have repeatedly warned that San Diego’s economic vitality is being stunted by Lindbergh’s cramped downtown location and single runway. In terms of myriad reports written, consultants hired and proposals forwarded, Lindbergh tops the list of unsolved civic dilemmas.

It also epitomizes the struggle being repeated throughout Southern California, where the convenience and commercial benefits of improved air transit continue to ram into concerns that new airports will bring more jet noise, air pollution and vehicle traffic.

Every possible replacement location in San Diego County has brought implacable opposition from homeowners, politicians or the military.

But under the guiding hand of state Sen. Steve Peace (D-Chula Vista), the Legislature drafted a plan to overcome NIMBYism and solve the Lindbergh dilemma.

A bill passed last year created a regional airport authority, whose members are not beholden to voters. The agency gradually is taking control of Lindbergh Field and assuming responsibility for the daunting task of finding a new location to serve more passengers and planes.

“We’re supposed to make the hard political choices no one has been willing to make,” said San Diego Councilman Byron Wear, a member of the authority’s interim governing board.

At 526 acres, Lindbergh is the smallest of any hub airport in the United States. The downtown location is convenient for many of the 16 million passengers it serves a year, but it provides a steep and harrowing approach for pilots.

Because Lindbergh has only one runway, two-thirds of local manufactured goods must be trucked to Los Angeles International Airport or the Ontario airport to get to market, the kind of added expense that keeps companies from locating in San Diego, officials say.

The latest study predicted that the airport will hit gridlock in 2012 and be unable to accommodate growth in passenger service. That would force flights, and big-spending tourists, to other cities.

Even a $232-million improvement project completed in 1998, including an expanded terminal and a new baggage area, was seen as only a temporary solution.

Officials at the new San Diego County Regional Airport Authority are aiming at a public vote in November 2004 on a proposal for a new airport to either replace or supplement Lindbergh. Another option, which also would require a vote, would be to expand the old downtown airfield.

A committee composed of transportation specialists with the San Diego Assn. of Governments and the Unified Port District of San Diego has compiled a list of 20 possible sites as part of a study costing $1.9 million, most of it from the Federal Aviation Administration.

The list, which was unveiled last week at a meeting of the authority’s interim board, included Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, northeast of downtown; Camp Pendleton on the county’s northern coast, and McClellan-Palomar Airport in Carlsbad.

The choices gave one member a sense of deja vu. Oceanside Mayor Terry Johnson noted that the list has several sites that have been rejected in the past. Johnson believes that, once all the studying and talking is finished, the only alternative will be to expand Lindbergh Field.

“These are the same sites that have been on the table for 40 years,” Johnson said. “When you come down to it, we’ll have three choices: Expand Lindbergh or build at Miramar or Camp Pendleton.”

Of those three choices, only expanding Lindbergh Field is viable, Johnson said. “I don’t see the military any time soon giving up those sites.”

Wedged between homes and an industrial site, Lindbergh Field, which opened in 1928, would be difficult to expand. Even if the Marine Corps relinquishes its adjacent boot camp, those 388 acres are seen by most airport planners as providing only a Band-Aid.

Airport planner Ted Anasis, of the San Diego Unified Port District, is confident that the public has finally realized that the county’s economic future is dimmer without a bigger airport.

“The question is whether you want your children to have the kind of good-paying jobs that come with a better industrial base or the kind of jobs you get with a service and tourist economy,” Anasis said.

Anasis believes that the solution to Lindbergh may come in several steps.

But others before Anasis also have predicted that San Diego’s mood has tipped in favor of finding a home for a second airport.

Steve Erie, a political science professor and infrastructure specialist at UC San Diego, is skeptical that the airport authority will succeed where the Port District, the current operator of the airport, has failed.

The governor, council and Board of Supervisors will each appoint one member to the authority’s executive board--to be paid a salary equivalent to a Superior Court judge, $136,000 a year.

Erie jokes that the authority bill is “term life insurance for Byron Wear and Steve Peace.” Both politicians are prevented by term limits from seeking reelection and both have shown interest in being appointed to the authority executive board.

Though San Diego has been debating what to do with Lindbergh Field, widespread residential growth has ensured that any possible site will have political and legal opposition, Erie said. Also, the Marine Corps has invested heavily in Camp Pendleton and Miramar.

“We’ve taken a step forward with a regional authority,” Erie said. “I just wish we’d done it 10 years ago, when we still had options.”