As a pile of harsh options for a new airport continues to grow for the county’s airport agency, board members took a more critical look at Lindbergh Field at a meeting Monday, March 13.
Faced with unabashed opposition from the Department of Defense to any form of joint-use and staggering price tags associated with building a new civilian airport in the deserts east of San Diego County, members of the airport authority’s Strategic Planning Committee showed renewed interest in maximizing Lindbergh’s potential.
The intensified concentration came after a presentation by Paul Etzel, director of San Diego State University’s Mount Laguna Observatory (MLO), said light pollution from an East County airport would severely reduce the capability of the high-powered telescopes.
Coupled with the anticipated increase in urban development a new airport would bring, the observatory would likely be forced to move at a price of at least $15 million, disrupting years of research and joint ventures between other observatories across the planet.
“We’re really in a unique position,” Etzel said.
So is the airport authority.
In just two months, the authority will need to settle on a suitable site to present to voters as a countywide advisory ballot Nov. 7. In that time, staff and consultants will be working at a feverish pace as they vet joint-use scenarios with Camp Pendleton, Marine Corps Air Stations at Miramar and East Miramar and North Island Naval Air Station (NAS).
A comparative analysis for those options will be presented in April and will be weighed against the two civilian alternatives in Campo/Boulevard and Imperial County. Lindbergh Field remains active on the authority’s list of potential sites, despite the fact that even under the most ambitious expansion plans, it could not handle long term projected passenger use.
But that didn’t stop the committee from at least taking a peek.
“Why are we not insisting on being as creative with Lindbergh Field as we are with the military sites?” said Lemon Grove Mayor Mary Teresa Sessom.
A staff presentation on the complications and pitfalls with a joint-use venture with North Island NAS, which would use two runways in a closed V-shape, served to highlight the committee’s interest in what could be done at Lindbergh’s present location.
Preliminary findings at North Island NAS show that the configuration will have difficulty meeting the Federal Aviation Administration’s threshold for crosswinds 15 percent of the year, especially during Santa Ana conditions. That means service would be severely cut up to about 54 days, negating the entire operation.
“We’ve got a challenge here, at best,” said board member William D. Lynch.
The authority’s staff didn’t yet know how the inability to meet the crosswind threshold would translate into actual capacity depletion, but guessed it might be near 50 percent.
“Isn’t that devastating?” Lynch said.
Sessom questioned the prudence in further studying the concept until the committee was refreshed on the impacts Tier 1 Criteria had on the original site.
Tier 1 Criteria measure the environmental impacts of airport concepts.
Angela Shafer-Payne, vice-president of strategic planning for the authority, said Tier 1 Criteria impacts would likely be less severe since the original concept called for the complete removal of military operations.
The expansion of Lindbergh Field, which calls for a second runway through Marine Corps Recruit Depot, came back to the table later in the meeting, with committee members discussing just how set in stone the mandate to accommodate 35 million annual passengers was. If that number were simply advisory, Lindbergh’s expansion would seem more feasible.
The committee also called for a presentation by several economists later this month on differing views concerning Lindbergh Field’s projected passenger use and capacity.
But the hint towards vetting Lindbergh more thoroughly wasn’t unanimous.
“The idea that we’re going to make something work here at Lindbergh that will serve the community for the next 100 years is false,” Lynch said.
But as November nears, the committee seemed reluctant to excise any option in the face of mounting opposition to distant desert airports and improbable military cooperation.
“A large value of this process is the process of elimination,” said committee chair Paul Nieto.