The battle lines for Marine Corps Air Station Miramar have already been drawn and now the armies are forming.
With six months to go before county voters have their say on a ballot recommending the joint-use of a new civilian airport at MCAS Miramar, community leaders and organizations on both sides of the proposal are slowly starting to coalesce into political action groups for what is sure to be the battle of the budgets later this fall.
The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority’s board voted 7-2 in favor of the Miramar concept June 5.
The proposal carves out 3,000 acres for a dual runway civilian airport that would run operations concurrently with those of the military, whose flight patterns would be moved south, expanding the accident potential zone and noise contours over more of the Mira Mesa and Tierrasanta communities.
While military operations would continue to take-off to the northwest above Carmel Valley, commercial flights would fly out to the southwest, over much of University City and La Jolla.
The proposal would also require the relocation of portions of Highway 163 and a five-mile section of Interstate 15 east at a cost running into the tens of millions of dollars.
In total, the concept is projected to cost about $6 billion.
Both sides agree that the challenge will be to reach voters outside of what is sure to be two very distinct camps in the northern communities surrounding Miramar and the southern neighborhoods near Lindbergh Field.
“I would expect that we’re going to run a vigorous campaign,” said John Kern, a campaign consultant for Coalition to Preserve the Economy, a political group that has formed in support of the ballot.
But so does T.J. Zane, director for Taxpayers For Responsible Planning, a political organization that has formed to absorb planning groups and community councils opposed to the Miramar proposal.
“First and foremost, it’s a public safety issue,” he said. “The major sticking point here is that the military needs it.”
But Zane, who was head of the TransNet campaign for Caltrans and the effort to save the Mt. Soledad cross, agreed that the main challenge for his group will be to reach voters outside of the area immediately affected by Miramar. It means a countywide campaign equipped with the standard arsenal ” polling, direct mailers, e-mails, town hall forums, public speaking and coalition building.
Zane said representatives from planning groups in University City, La Jolla, Mira Mesa and Tierrasanta have formed steering and executive committees with his organization in an effort to coordinate fund-raising for the campaign expected to kick-off after Labor Day.
According to Zane, the campaign is expected to cost $1.5 million to $2 million, with the first fund-raiser scheduled for mid-July.
“We anticipate that the majority of our money will come through more organized efforts,” he said.
Kern, whose group is expected to carry the flag in support of the ballot, would not divulge a timeline for his campaign, saying it was “way too early” to talk about what would happen in the fall and refused to give specifics on what groups would be involved in the push.
John Chalker, who chairs the Alliance in Support of Airport Progress in the 21st Century (ASAP21), a business association tracking the airport issue independent of the airport authority but that is associated with the Coalition to Preserve the Economy, said his group has three more community listening forums to complete.
Community input from the forums held in each of the county supervisors’ districts will be distributed to ASAP21’s members, but will likely find its way to the coalition and used for the campaign.
A town hall meeting held at the Tierrasanta Lutheran Church on June 15 by joint-use opponents recalled much of the vigor from a similar meeting sponsored by the airport authority last year in Point Loma when the so-called Concept 6, which called for a second parallel runway through much of Midway and the removal of thousands of businesses and residents, was still on the table ” standing room only and full of opposition.
“We should no longer wait. I think it’s time to take action,” Eric Germain, president of the Tierrasanta Community Council, told the audience of more than 150. “That’s how we win this. We’re going to be very busy fighting [the ballot].”
Residents at the meeting were bolstered by the full support of their state and federal representatives. Staffers for State Senator Kristinte Kehoe (D- San Diego), State Assemblyman George Plescia (R-San Diego) and Rep. Duncan Hunter (R- Alpine) sang a common chorus of opposition to the dangers of a joint-use airport.
“We’re working together, Democrats and Republicans, it doesn’t matter,” said Janelle Riella, Plescia’s district director. “We’re all adamantly opposed to it.”
Councilmen Brian Maienschein and Jim Madaffer, who helped organize the event, also voiced their opposition, as did Councilman Scott Peters through a statement read by his chief of staff.
“Why has Lindbergh Field been ignored? Why won’t we just bite the bullet and make the investment in the airport that we’ve had since 1927?” Madaffer told the audience.
But Lindbergh Field does have a $500 million master plan meant to maximize its capacity through 2015 that includes terminal expansion, a parking structure and reconfiguration of on-field operations.
Cynthia Conger, chair of the Peninsula Community Planning Board, said after that date, though, a solution must be found elsewhere in light of the county’s projected population increase by well over one million people.
“They have not gone to the meetings. There’s no way you can increase that capacity to serve that kind of population,” she said. “It doesn’t happen.”
Councilmen Kevin Faulconer, whose district includes Lindbergh Field, could not be reached for comment, but during public comment at the June 5 airport authority meeting he did not explicitly support the Miramar proposal, saying only that Lindbergh Field was not a viable long-term solution.
Lemon Grove Mayor Mary Teresa Sessom, who sits on the airport authority’s board and voted against the Miramar proposal, told the audience at the Tierrasanta meeting that regardless of what happens Nov. 7, a decision must be made so that the county can plan.
“This region needs to be able to move forward,” she said. “There’s a lot we haven’t been able to plan because we have forever danced around the issue of ‘What about a new airport?'”
Sessom, along with her colleagues at the airport authority, is not allowed to actively campaign for or against the ballot, but was on hand to answer questions from the audience.
The campaigns for and against the Miramar proposal, though, have free reign with the opposition getting a head start.
“I think if we educate people to the real cost of moving the airport ” especially with the infrastructure ” I don’t think it’s going to be quite as difficult a sale as people are afraid of,” said Linda Colley, chair of the University City Planning Group.
But Tim Golba, president of the La Jolla Community Planning Association, said he expected the measure to pass, but for all the wrong reasons.
“It really is a no confidence vote in the military,” he said.
Kern disagreed.
“Anybody who realistically looks at this issue comes to the same conclusion ” it’s Miramar,” Kern said. “Is Lindbergh Field adequate right now? Absolutely. Does anybody want to kick the Marines out of Miramar right now? Absolutely not. That’s not even a close call.”
Kern said the Marines, even now, have plans to move assets to Yuma, Arizona and that the landscape for national defense could change drastically in 20 years ” a central point of the upcoming campaign.
“I think it’s a pretty simple message and a pretty simple campaign,” he said.
But the military has said repeatedly that they have no intention of moving and that combining civilian operations with fighter jets is unsafe at best. A federal law passed in 1996 also expressly prohibits any form of joint-use of Miramar by civilian aircraft.
A similar countywide ballot measure pushing for the civilian use of Miramar passed by 52 percent in 1994, but lacked the strong wording of the current proposal and was ignored by the military.