Alterations to LAX Plan May Not Fly

Six months before the City Council gets its say on Mayor James K. Hahn’s $9-billion plan to modernize Los Angeles International Airport, some legal experts are arguing that time constraints and strict environ- mental laws will prevent the council from altering the proposal.

If the council makes significant changes, according to this line of thinking, it might send airport officials back to the drawing board and jeopardize the nine years and $123 million the city has already spent to devise a politically palatable LAX plan.

Not everybody at City Hall agrees with this analysis. In particular, Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski, whose district includes LAX and who has been critical of Hahn’s plan, said she believes that the council can and should amend the proposal.

And legal experts hired by several industries who are opposed to Hahn’s plan say the notion that policymakers’ hands will be tied by the time they review the proposal contradicts the very point of the deliberate public review process.

“The thing that’s important is to allow for public agencies to respond to public comments by making modifications in the project,” said Barbara Higgins, a Los Angeles attorney who represents the Los Angeles Airlines Airport Affairs Committee, a group of airlines that carry almost half the passenger traffic at LAX. “Otherwise, the whole public review process would be meaningless.”

The dispute has emerged as Hahn’s LAX plan enters a crucial phase. Airport officials will finish incorporating 3,200 public comments into the proposal in the next several weeks. The 31-volume report is scheduled to make its way through numerous city and county agencies this year on a tight timeline that calls for council approval by Sept. 14.

In the meantime, airport-area residents, the airlines and several influential local and federal lawmakers have called on Hahn to make significant changes, including scrapping a controversial new passenger check-in center near the San Diego Freeway, abandoning a plan to demolish Terminals 1, 2 and 3, and revising the construction schedule.

But Hahn’s advisors say that making changes of that magnitude would stall the massive public works project. An army of consultants has already spent 36 months devising the mayor’s LAX plan.

“You can’t just simply add a program, or subtract a program, or reschedule it without it having potential implications for each of the different elements you’re looking at,” said Steve Rosenthal, a Washington, D.C., attorney who advises the city.

Hahn has refused to revise his plan before it’s considered by the council.”The mayor feels that the plan should be considered as a whole program,” said Shannon Murphy, a spokeswoman for Hahn. “It identifies specific impacts and mitigations. We feel that significant changes to the plan may imperil its validity.”

Hahn’s plan would dramatically alter the way travelers arrive at and use LAX. Private vehicles would be rerouted to a remote check-in facility near the 405 Freeway; Terminals 1, 2 and 3 would be demolished; and parking garages in the center of the airport would be knocked down to make way for a new central terminal. An elevated train would connect the check-in center, a consolidated rental car facility and a transportation center near Aviation Boulevard and the Century Freeway with the current facility.

The council will choose from among Hahn’s vision and several expansion plans proposed by his predecessor, Mayor Richard Riordan, or it could decide to do nothing at all.

Hahn discarded Riordan’s plans after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. He hoped to propose an LAX remodeling plan that everyone could agree on, in part by trying to limit capacity at the facility to 78 million passengers annually.

But a consensus has eluded the mayor. Interests that he aggressively courted during the planning phase, including most airlines at LAX and residents in communities around the airport, now oppose his plan, known as Alternative D. These groups argue that environmental laws do not preclude the mayor from changing his proposal.

“We believe the city has wide latitude in making modifications to Alternative D,” said Higgins, the airlines’ representative. “We don’t believe that modifications to Alternative D would require a new environmental document and starting the procedure all over again.”

Miscikowski said she believes officials can still meet environmental requirements by drafting a compromise plan that draws on elements studied and included in Riordan’s and Hahn’s proposals.

Changes can be made “as long as one created a hybrid of the good things from within those plans, using some elements that are consistent throughout,” Miscikowski said. “You can adopt a compromise or drop things out, as long as you have a sense that the mitigation measures are addressed in the document.”

Miscikowski met with Rosenthal in Washington earlier this month and discussed the mayor’s plan for several hours. The councilwoman has also written a letter to City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo asking his office for guidance on whether the council can ultimately change Hahn’s plan.

“Will the council, as the actual certification authority for the [environmental documents], have the ability, as we do in many land-use cases, to recommend or request changes?” she wrote.

Delgadillo met with Miscikowski and agreed that the council could pick and choose from projects in Riordan’s and Hahn’s plans as long as those projects had adequate environmental analysis, said Eric Moses, a spokesman for the city attorney.

Hahn’s advisors disagree with Miscikowski’s analysis and argue that the mayor’s LAX plan was carefully crafted to comply with stringent state and federal environmental laws and to thwart legal challenges.

Those laws require a complex analysis of more than 50 topics, and a mitigation plan that compensates for increased traffic, noise and pollution that would result from overhauling the airport. Any major changes to the proposal could force officials to rework the analysis, legal experts said.

In addition, airport officials say they cannot remove the plan’s centerpiece -- the ground transportation center at Manchester Square -- because the facility is necessary to absorb increased traffic that is expected to choke surface streets near the airport by 2015.

Hahn’s plan would fail to comply with state and federal environmental law if the facility were taken out of the proposal, said Jim Ritchie, a deputy executive director at the city’s airport agency.

“The plan is modeled around 60% of the vehicular traffic going into and out of the ground transportation center,” Ritchie said. If it “were taken out of the plan, the traffic analysis alone would send us back to the drawing boards for at least another year.”

Such a delay could doom the project, he said. Hahn’s plan is the 33rd alternative developed by the airport agency over the last decade. The process ate up valuable time, leaving the agency only 11 years, under Federal Aviation Administration guidelines, to secure approval and build the project. If officials are forced to return to the drawing board they may have to kill the project altogether, Hahn’s advisors said.

With that in mind, experts and interested parties disagree about what kinds of revisions city agencies can make without requiring the airport agency and its consultants to redo the plan.

“The council really can do whatever they want when they approve the project,” said Sean Hecht, executive director of the UCLA Environmental Law Center. “The question is if whatever changes they make in their project make the [environmental] document inadequate.”

Exactly what council members are allowed to do with Hahn’s plan depends upon the interpretation of the word “significant,” legal experts agree.

“They can make changes that are not deemed significant,” said Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “It’s not uncommon for changes to be made in a project that reduce or downsize impacts and that would not in most cases require a revision of the environmental documents.”

Too large a change can invalidate the plans, however, as in the case of the Playa Vista development, a dense mix of residential and commercial projects north of LAX. After phase two of that project was downsized by 75%, officials had to rewrite all of the plan’s environmental documents, a process that required two years, said Steve Sugarman, a spokesman for Playa Vista.

When the City Council reviews Hahn’s LAX plan, it can interpret which changes are “significant” by looking at air, traffic and noise thresholds allowed by environmental law, attorneys say. But figuring out whether a change violates these standards takes time, they add.

“When you are going to change something over here, in order to make sure that something doesn’t pop up over there ... you just about have to run a computer model,” said Carlyle Hall, an attorney who advises the city. “That’s not only expensive, but it takes time to set up the model, to input it, then to run it and then to analyze it.”

Airport officials have devised an ambitious schedule for Hahn’s LAX plan that would allow the agency to proceed with construction next year, according to documents obtained by The Times.

Meeting these tentative deadlines is essential, proponents argue, because the plan is running out of time. To ensure that data used to calculate the project’s impact on the environment don’t become outdated, the FAA will require Los Angeles to finish construction by the end of 2015, which is 20 years after work began on the airport master plan.

To take advantage of the 11 years that remain, the Airport Commission and the city’s Planning Commission are scheduled to approve the proposal by June 14, an airport agency timeline shows. The county’s Airport Land Use Commission and the City Council are slated to sign off by Sept. 14, and the city would receive final approval from the FAA by Nov. 23, according to the schedule.

The FAA has promised to expedite its review of the mayor’s plan and has assigned additional staff to its Los Angeles office to help speed environmental documents through the process, Ritchie said. If city officials change the plan significantly, this expedited review could be canceled, setting the project back further, he added.

Project proponents argue that significant changes to Hahn’s LAX plan would not only endanger their timeline, but could also open the city up to lawsuits that challenged the proposal’s validity.

“When you get to the five-yard line,” Hall said, “that’s not where you want to fumble the ball.”

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Tight timeline

City officials have devised an ambitious schedule for Mayor James K. Hahn’s $9-billion modernization plan for Los Angeles International Airport. A few key dates in the tentative timeline:

* April 28: The date the city has said it will release final environmental documents.

* June 14: Deadline for Airport Commission and the city’s Planning Commission to approve the plan.

* Sept. 14: Deadline for county Airport Land Use Commission and the City Council to sign off.

* Nov. 23: Deadline for the Federal Aviation Administration to approve the plan.

Los Angeles Times