Town hall on airport site selection draws small crowd

By: MARK WALKER - Staff Writer | Monday, October 24, 2005 9:22 PM PDT ∞

RANCHO PENASQUITOS ---- With six months before they are supposed to make a recommendation for a new or expanded regional airport, officials with the agency heading the process came to North County on Monday to share what they know and answer questions.

About three dozen people attended two-hour town hall session at West Hills High School to hear the briefing from the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority and to express their views.

Authority board Chairman Joe Craver said the recommendation the agency is scheduled to make in April will not give county voters a list to choose from when they go to the polls in November 2006.

"It will be one solution and one solution only," Craver said. "It will need 50 percent plus one to pass."

The light crowd that came to the school's performing arts center heard Rancho Bernardo's Richard Walker suggest that the existing airport at Lindbergh Field be expanded with a second runway by filling in part of the adjacent bay.

Thella Bowens, the airport authority's president and chief executive officer, joined Craver and Angela Shafer Payne, the authority's vice president for strategic development as well as a cadre of agency staffers on hand to answer questions.

Wayne Carson of Poway wanted to know the practicality of linking a metropolitan area park-and-ride lot to two far-away sites on the authority's list of possible new airport sites. One of those is Campo in the southeastern portion of the county and the other is a site in Imperial County just over the border with San Diego County.

Shafer Payne said that a high-speed train could reach Campo in about 22 minutes and the Imperial site in about half an hour.

Campo and Imperial, along with Lindbergh, comprise civilian location list. A fourth civilian site, one near Borrego Springs, remains on the list of potential sites, but is considered unlikely because of its distance and because it is linked to the San Diego region by a two-lane highway with no plans for expansion or additional mass transit measures.

The authority also has five military sites on its list. Two are at Miramar Marine Corps Air Station; the others are Camp Pendleton, North Island Naval Air Station and March Air Reserve Base in southwest Riverside County.

The military sites have not yet been analyzed because the county's congressional delegation asked the authority to hold off until the recent round of base closures and realignments nationwide was complete. That process is expected to end early next month unless Congress intervenes, which it has not signalled it intends to do.

The authority must study the military sites under the state legislation that established it in 2003, and required it to come with an airport expansion plan or recommendation for a new airport in time for the November 2006 ballot.

Joint use whereby civilian and military aircraft share the same field will be a part of those studies.

The need for a larger airport to handle expected growth in the region has been sanctioned by the Federal Aviation Administration.

Bowens pointed out that the venerable 661-acre Lindbergh Field, the 75-year-old downtown San Diego airport officially known as San Diego International Airport, is the busiest single-runway airport in the nation.

By comparison, the airport in Tampa, Fla., a comparably sized region with about the same level of air traffic, is a 3,300-acre facility with three runways.

"We need an airport that has two runways of 12,000 feet in length separated by a minimum of 4,300 feet," Bowens said.

Without that kind of room, Lindbergh will experience severe congestion waits in the terminal and on its taxiways, she said.

Shafer Payne said that the constraints faced in expanding Lindbergh aren't the only challenges.

"There isn't one site on the list that doesn't have problems," she said.

A recent authority survey found that two-thirds of those polled said they would vote in favor of a Lindbergh expansion or a new airport site, up from 55 percent in a similar survey conducted a year earlier.

Vista Mayor Morris Vance and Oceanside's Robert Maxwell, North County's two representatives on the nine-member authority board, did not attend the session.

Contact staff writer Mark Walker at (760) 740-3529 or mlwalker@nctimes.com.

The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority will conduct two town halls in North County next month. The first takes place at 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 3 at Mission Hills School in Del Mar and will be followed by 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 10 gathering at the Fallbrook Community Center.