A New KSAN?

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1


[ I'm surpised this was missed. But it's coming into major play
now. -Ed. ]

Group will hone criteria for judging 16 proposals
By Jeff Ristine
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

August 24, 2003

San Diego's airport-site tournament is heading into the playoffs.

A group has been assembled to help the region meet future
air-transportation needs. The group, mulling options that reach from
the desert to the sea, will begin to eliminate the least workable ideas
in a meeting this week.

The 32-member Public Working Group will weigh topography, driving time,
noise, rare grasslands and other issues in trimming the 16 sites
proposed to replace or augment Lindbergh Field.

After a meeting Tuesday and a September session, at least half the
options are expected to fall off the table.

Airport consultants, members of the group and leaders of a new public
agency, the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, say it's hard
to overstate the importance of the effort. As Lindbergh Field's 614
acres become increasingly unable to meet passenger and cargo demand,
they say, economic losses to the region could reach recession levels.

"This is our last chance," said authority board Chairman Joseph Craver.
"I'll tell you for su We are not going to fail."

The San Diego Association of Governments assembled the Public Working
Group in 2001 as a brain trust of stakeholders on the airport issue:
representatives of public agencies, the military, environmental and
citizen groups, business, aviation regulators and air-passenger and
cargo carriers. A neutral facilitator runs the meetings.

Last month, the group reviewed data collected by consultants for each
of the sites, which include three outside San Diego County and seven at
active military installations.

Tuesday, the group will discuss the criteria and thresholds a site will
need to remain on the list.

The group is free to establish any cutoff. It could decide that some
sites are too far for most people to reach easily by car. Or it might
try to establish cost limits of acquiring and preparing a site and
handling environmental issues.

Deleting specific sites will come later, when the group is expected to
settle upon an undetermined but manageable number of locations ? likely
five to seven ? for more detailed analysis.

Ultimately, the Regional Airport Authority's board will present an
option to voters. A 2004 ballot measure has not been abandoned, but
2006 looks more likely.


Options and scenarios
For now, there are 16 sites but 23 "scenarios" in play.
The northern half of the site map has Camp Pendleton; a site west of
Warner Springs and east of Lake Henshaw; a spot in Ramona; an Oceanside
location encompassing its existing municipal airport; and a Carlsbad
site encompassing McClellan-Palomar Airport.

In San Diego, the sites are Miramar Marine Corps Air Station; East
Miramar, also on the Marine base; plus an oceanic "floating" airport
three to five miles off Ocean Beach.

On the southern half of the map are North Island Naval Air Station; the
National City bayfront near Interstate 5 and state Route 54; the
central portion of Coronado's the Silver Strand; another Coronado site
encompassing the Naval Communications Station and coastal salt marshes;
and Otay Mesa south of Brown Field.

Outside the county: March Air Reserve Base near Riverside; a
nondescript desert site in southwestern Imperial County; and Tijuana's
Rodriguez International Airport.

Each site has been evaluated on operational requirements, ground
access, environmental impacts and site development needs, giving the
group some idea of how hard each would be to build, how well it would
serve the public and how many people could be negatively affected by an
airport.

Seven two-site scenarios expand the options.

Under some, Lindbergh Field would continue as a short-hop airport, for
flights 500 miles and less, while a North County site would handle
longer flights.

In another, Lindbergh would become a destination for parking,
drop-offs, pickups and check-in ? what planners are calling a
"landside" facility ? with travelers transported through some as-yet
unknown method to an "airside" facility at North Island where the jets
would come and go. Yet another option: air operations at Lindbergh and
North Island.


An unnatural selection
To illustrate the difficulty of the selection process, consider one
hypothetical checklist:
Dismissing sites that would require more than 15,000 residents to be
relocated eliminates Oceanside and National City.

Of the remaining sites, four would have significant obstructions from
mountains: McClellan-Palomar, Ramona, Otay Mesa and Warner Springs.
Suppose those, too, are cut.

Of those still on the list, crossing out sites 45 minutes or more away
from at least half the county's population ? an excessive distance by
national airport standards ? would eliminate the Riverside County,
desert, Camp Pendleton and Tijuana sites.

Suppose the group then eliminated sites requiring more than 1,000 acres
of construction on the ocean or San Diego Bay: off go National City
bayfront, the Silver Strand and the "floating" airport.

Then suppose the group decides it wouldn't make sense to build an
airport requiring noise mitigation for more than 7,000 residents. That
takes the North Island and salt marsh/Naval Communication sites off the
remainder of the list.

If more than 2,500 acres of environmental mitigation (wetlands, vernal
pools, rare grasslands and the like) are considered too much or too
expensive, East Miramar is out.

And suppose, as a final criterion, the group sees little point in
pursuing the Miramar air station, given the historic unwillingness of
the military to abandon the site and the working group's decision that
joint use won't work.

So what does that leave from the original list of 16 sites?

Nothing at all.


Everything on the table
Crossing out options until none remains is an easy gimmick and perhaps
unduly pessimistic, but it illustrates the challenges facing the Public
Working Group and the Regional Airport Authority board of directors.
"On an absolute basis, there is no 'best' site to recommend," said
group member John Chalker, executive director of a business and civic
coalition trying to promote consensus on an airport plan. "Every single
site has got problems associated with it.

"It's all going to be on a relative basis, and you're going to get to
that conclusion through . . . a process of elimination. Part of what
you're doing is making sure that all possibilities and potential sites
have been fairly examined before they're discarded."

That's why Ramona, for example, remains on the list in the face of
overwhelming opposition from residents and elected officials.

An earlier list of 32 potential sites, whittled down in 2002, included
a dredge-and-fill proposal for Mission Bay, as well as the Rincon
Indian Reservation, Montgomery Field in Kearny Mesa, and sites in
Torrey Pines and Carmel Valley.

But by deliberating over even seemingly ludicrous proposals, the
working group and authority hope to build credibility with the public.

"The reason all that was on there is so that nobody can go back and say
there was an option that wasn't fully vetted," said William Lynch, one
of three executive members of the airport authority board.

In contrast, Chalker said, previous airport siting exercises in San
Diego tended to focus on one location at a time.

This time, analysts have been scrupulous in developing an
apples-to-apples comparison of the 16 sites. The map for each proposal
shows an identical site development area for each site (except North
Island): two 12,000-foot runways separated by at least 4,300 feet.

Doing so results in designs taking out the Hotel del Coronado and
Legoland in Carlsbad, unpopular outcomes most agree won't happen.

Site selection is subject to other twists and turns.

The Public Working Group last year, as part of its initial site
screening, eliminated joint-use scenarios with the military. But Thella
Bowens, president and chief executive officer of the Regional Airport
Authority, said the board of directors could initiate such discussions
with the Pentagon.

Options involving Tijuana-Rodriguez Airport, including an idea that
calls for crossovers to and from a U.S. "landside" facility, also are
fraught with unanswered questions. Angela Shafer-Payne, vice president
of strategic planning for the airport authority, said planners would
need to develop a method of moving between the two nations "different
from the existing border/customs structure."

The authority board doesn't expect any trouble selling the public on
the need to look beyond Lindbergh Field for future air transportation
needs.

In the year 2030 alone, analysts have projected the county could
sacrifice $30 billion or more in potential ? but unproduced ? goods and
services if the regional economy becomes stifled by an increasingly
inadequate international airport.

Xema Jacobson, a member of the authority board of directors, said the
Public Working Group's deliberations will be critical in presenting an
airport solution to the community.

"I don't have any opinion on any of the sites, pro or con, at this
point because I'm going to let the process go through and keep an open
mind," Jacobson said. "Then we'll go out and explain what our answer
is."

BL.
- --
Brad Littlejohn | Email:
Unix Systems Administrator, |
Web + NewsMaster, BOFH.. Smeghead! | http://www.sbcglobal.net/~tyketto
PGP: 1024D/E319F0BF 6980 AAD6 7329 E9E6 D569 F620 C819 199A E319 F0BF

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux)

iD8DBQFANaY5yBkZmuMZ8L8RAnKBAKDocXZVR76axMFrMD7/Cb1HTGbZBQCgnvLG
X/UowYHVRalxq64QSxV0P5g=
=BrCw
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

So what does that leave from the original list of 16 sites?
Nothing at all.


After reading all that, I said to myself, "that leaves nothing."
Two paragraphs later they came to the same conclusion.
personally, I think they should pave what is left of San Diego
County and just run generic 757's up to LAX....generic in the sense
that it is run like a train or bus. I say that last statement
seriously and the previous statement about paving San Diego as
a after-the-fact as all of San Diego is paved already. CLD
(don't know the IATA code but this is the code airlines use)
just had 30000 homes built along the approach corridor.
BTW, what "mountains" are they talking about. There are some
very small hills but the empanage of a Piper stands above them
almost.

The best place to build it is Miramar NAS but that will
never happen due to La Jolla being so close.

San Diego has not had city planning in decades and it really
shows. They've been talking about the airport issue 10 years
ago. Too little too late.

But it does have perfect VFR weather.

Gerald

Gerald Sylvester ) wrote:

I say that last statement
seriously and the previous statement about paving San Diego as
a after-the-fact as all of San Diego is paved already.

Two words: Balboa Park.

--
Peter












----== Posted via Newsfeed.Com - Unlimited-Uncensored-Secure Usenet News==----
http://www.newsfeed.com The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! 100,000 Newsgroups
---= 19 East/West-Coast Specialized Servers - Total Privacy via Encryption =---

not to mention that the Navy OFFERED Miramar to the city years ago

They take a long time to learn

"Gerald Sylvester" wrote in message
nk.net...

So what does that leave from the original list of 16 sites?
Nothing at all.


After reading all that, I said to myself, "that leaves nothing."
Two paragraphs later they came to the same conclusion.
personally, I think they should pave what is left of San Diego
County and just run generic 757's up to LAX....generic in the sense
that it is run like a train or bus. I say that last statement
seriously and the previous statement about paving San Diego as
a after-the-fact as all of San Diego is paved already. CLD
(don't know the IATA code but this is the code airlines use)
just had 30000 homes built along the approach corridor.
BTW, what "mountains" are they talking about. There are some
very small hills but the empanage of a Piper stands above them
almost.

The best place to build it is Miramar NAS but that will
never happen due to La Jolla being so close.

San Diego has not had city planning in decades and it really
shows. They've been talking about the airport issue 10 years
ago. Too little too late.

But it does have perfect VFR weather.

Gerald