Airport officials trudged through yet another round of unhappy news Monday, March 27, when two military representatives roundly condemned the so-called Tier 1 criteria used to usher three military sites through to the next level of evaluation.
The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority’s planning committee also heard the results of a three-month-long study completed by the San Diego Association of Governments on the feasibility and costs associated with building a high-speed maglev train to the Imperial County desert site.
SANDAG consultants put the price tag at $15 – $18.5 billion for the cheapest alignment following the Interstate 8 corridor, but warned of the risks involved with not knowing how much power it would take to push the train up a steep grade through the Laguna Mountains at speeds of around 250 mph.
As the clock ticks toward a self-imposed May deadline for choosing a site in time for the November ballot, the airport authority is clearly what board member William Lynch described as “in between a rock and a hard place,” adding that any notion of building a 3,000-acre airport anywhere near downtown was probably false.
Faced with that possibility, board members have been increasingly vocal on the need to be more flexible in order to work around site obstacles.
“Everybody has to show some flexibility here,” said District 4 Councilman Tony Young, who sits on the authority’s board. “If we stick with joint-use, we’re missing the boat.”
Col. Michael Brooker, director of aviation policy for Marine Corps Installations West, bemoaned the authority’s Tier 1 criteria, which measures the impact of an airport option on the surrounding environment in six basic categories.
Concepts for Camp Pendleton, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar and Naval Air Station North Island all passed Tier 1 criteria and are now undergoing a much more detailed comparative analysis.
Brooker’s main objection was that Tier 1 criteria doesn’t take military operations into consideration, especially noise impacts.
“You need a better product before you can say Tier 1 analysis is complete,” he said.
In an effort to get away from the pitfalls of joint-use, Young moved to recommend to the full board Monday, April 3, that options for a fully independent civilian airport on Miramar be looked at. That motion eventually passed 3-1, but not without a full round of discourse.
“I still don’t understand what part of ‘no’ we don’t understand,” said board member Mary Teresa Sessom. “This is the march to Miramar, let’s face it.”
Young didn’t back down, saying the military would have to be more cooperative in exploring more unconventional options, such as swapping land or buying it outright, even in the face of a flat-out ‘no’ from the Secretary of the Navy.
But Sessom predicted that even if voters approved an option involving Miramar, no Congressional representative would be able to secure it, putting the authority back to square one.
“We will have failed the people of San Diego County,” she said.
Lynch, though, said he didn’t “expect the military to come rushing forward to help us solve our problem” until there was unified public opinion born out of a countywide vote.
Dwindling options weren’t the only thing the authority had to digest as SANDAG’s maglev feasibility study, made public last week, was formally presented to the committee. The steep price tags and lack of concrete comparative numbers prompted some board members to question whether the high-speed train was indeed feasible.
“What worries me is the building of a white elephant,” Lynch said. “I’m seriously worried about the cost.”
Consultants tagged rider fees for the train at $20 one-way, which would cover operating costs assuming nearly half of all airport users take the maglev.
The high cost of building the train elicited a hair-pulling reaction from Lynch and other members frustrated by the mounting obstacles surrounding the few site options left.
“I’m just flabbergasted by that $20 fee,” Lynch said.
In addition to funding a likely $500 – $600 million annual finance payment for the system, Lynch and other board members were “shocked” by what they felt was a liberal ridership forecast of 48 percent.
“If we build it, will people use it?” board member Robert Maxwell said.
All of the forecasting and guesswork stems from the lack of anything to compare the project to, save a 19-mile-long commercial maglev operation in Shanghai, China. Even so, those trains operate on relatively flat terrain, whereas San Diego’s maglev will need to surmount a 4,600-foot mountain range.
“This level of the study is an extremely rough analysis,” said Charles Quandel, vice-president of HTNB, the consulting group hired by SANDAG to help with the study. “Technologically, it is feasible, it can make these grades. The risk is on the dollars.”