The San Diego International Airport has released a plan to redevelop Terminal 1 that would push the costs to minimize traffic, transit, air emissions and noise impacts onto residents, local businesses, the City of San Diego, the Port of San Diego, SANDAG and others. Unless corrected, this project threatens nearby neighborhoods, leaving them with more traffic, more noise and more air pollution, and little in the way of plans to eliminate or minimize these negative impacts. The Airport’s environmental impact report, or EIR, uses outdated facts, understates problems this redevelopment creates and ignores the impacts on residents and businesses in Point Loma and our beach communities. The Airport should go back to the drawing board and get it right. Despite its $1 billion price tag, the Airport’s redevelopment plan fails to move passengers efficiently, and its analysis fails to address all the problems it will cause outside the airport fence.
As usual, the Airport’s environmental impact report fails to analyze connecting the trolley with the Airport. The Airport can and should build a “People Mover” that takes passengers to the Washington Street and Middletown trolley stops, following the model that SFO and LAX have employed.”
The airport’s narrowly-focused and insufficient analysis covers only Harbor Drive between Grape St. and Terminal 2, meaning traffic and noise impacts in Point Loma, Ocean Beach and elsewhere were ignored, and no plans are offered to deal with problems in these communities. Similarly, the impact report offers no real solutions to reduce greenhouse gases.
San Diego deserves a world-class airport that will serve our entire region as well as visitors to our amazing city that also addresses and mitigates real impacts to surrounding neighborhoods — not just those on airport property. Lorie Zapf is a San Diego City Councilmember representing Council District Two, home to Point Loma, Ocean Beach, Mission Beach, Midway, Clairemont, Linda Vista and Pacific Beach.