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thedrifter
09-30-03, 06:02 AM
Airport would shut down Pendleton, Marines say

Last modified Saturday, September 27, 2003 10:31 PM PDT

By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer

CAMP PENDLETON ---- Placing San Diego County's new airport on Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base could halt the myriad coordinated training operations at one of the West Coast's most strategic military installations, military officials said last week.

"It would close us down," said Larry Rannals, Camp Pendleton community plans and liaison officer in an interview last week on the eve of a crucial milestone in the county's site search.

The region can have an international airport at that location if it wants, or it can have a major military base where beach landings are practiced and explosive artillery is launched thousands of feet into the air, Rannals said.

"But you can't have both," he said.

Rugged terrain, sweeping environmental restrictions, a huge impact on base communities and direct conflict with military operations would prevent any airport plan from taking off, Rannals said.

Thursday is key

The comments came in advance of a Thursday meeting at which the nine-member San Diego County Regional Airport Authority board will consider which of 16 potential sites to carry forward for detailed analysis in a second round of study, after spending $1.9 million to get the ball rolling.

Regional planners are operating under the assumption that a local base might become available through 2005 "BRAC" ---- the federal base realignment and closure process ---- which could see the Pentagon decide to shutter dozens of military installations across the nation.

Relying in part on the working group's criteria for narrowing the field of candidate sites, the agency staff recommended Friday that the board carry forward seven sites ---- including the 3,000 acres on the coastal southwest corner of 125,000-acre Pendleton, just north of Oceanside.

Other recommended finalists are: Miramar Marine Corps Air Station (two sites), Naval Air Station North Island, western Imperial County along Interstate 8, March Air Reserve Base near Riverside and Tijuana Rodriguez International Airport.

Airport officials anticipate spending about $1 million on each site to be studied, and are hoping to cover most of the cost with a Federal Aviation Administration grant.

A waste of money?

Rannals said it is foolish to continue looking at Pendleton.

"Why waste a million dollars of the FAA's grant money to study a site that's not realistic?" Rannals asked.

Airport authority officials counter that if it becomes clear soon after the study starts that any particular site won't work, the full $1 million won't be spent on that site.

However, Camp Pendleton is attractive to regional planners because a North County airport would be convenient to residents in Orange County and southwestern Riverside County.

"Camp Pendleton would provide a solution not only for San Diego, but for Orange County and to some extent for Los Angeles as well," said Byron Wear of San Diego, a former interim airport board member who believes the base is one of the region's top two or three choices.

Where it can't go

Planned expansion of Ontario International Airport is expected to capture most Riverside County air travel business. But Orange County's John Wayne Airport is near capacity and cannot accept more traffic, and residents there rejected building a bigger airport at the former El Toro Marine base.

Los Angeles International also is near capacity and is not expected to expand significantly, regional aviation planners say. Ontario is expanding, but it is a long, grueling ride from the fast-growing southern tip of Orange County.

For most San Diego County residents, Wear said, a Pendleton airport would be convenient for long cross-country flights. "It certainly would beat LAX," he said. But he suggested that under that scenario, Lindbergh Field in San Diego would remain open to provide short-haul service to places such as Phoenix, San Francisco and Las Vegas.

Miramar is a more central location for San Diego County, and for that reason is considered the odds-on favorite to become the No. 1 choice.

continued....

thedrifter
09-30-03, 06:02 AM
North County advantage

But Wear said the North County base offers a potential political advantage: Miramar is ringed by single-family neighborhoods, some of them very influential, such as La Jolla, while the Pendleton site is bordered only on the south by neighborhoods, in Oceanside and Vista. And noisy takeoffs would be to the northwest over the ocean, rather than to the southeast, he said.

The airport authority is analyzing Pendleton and other bases only under the premise that one might become available, said Angela Shafer-Payne, vice president of strategic planning for the airport authority.

"We're clear on that," she said. "We aren't going into this with some kind of feeling that we own those lands."

The Pendleton site may be attractive, but that does not mean a marriage with the military would work. The Marines, who are not used to submitting to anyone save for the commander in chief, would have to bow to the numerous demands of a major passenger airport. As a result, virtually every major operation would have to be scaled back, if not eliminated, Rannals said. Operations would be so restricted as to severely compromise the base's mission, he said.

Pendleton's importance

Home to the 35,000 Marines and sailors of the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, he said, Camp Pendleton is one of the busiest bases in the country. More than 45,000 individual training events are conducted there every year.

Pendleton's enormous size and its location on the coast offers a unique opportunity to train in realistic "three-dimensional" combat scenarios that coordinate activities on land, in the air and in the sea, Rannals said.

Pendleton has the West Coast's only amphibious landing craft unit (Assault Craft Unit 5), and it happens to be where the international airport would go, he said.

Besides having to relocate that unit, an airport would shut down amphibious exercises at Red Beach a mile and a half up the coast, near the Las Pulgas exit. With two parallel 12,000-foot runways oriented northwest to southeast along Interstate 5, jets would take off into prevailing winds right over the beach.

"That's the heart and soul of our amphibious training operations here on Camp Pendleton," Rannals said. "If we can't do amphibious training operations we might as well close up and go home. That's our bread and butter."

A rich depository

And it's not as if the Marines can just march a few miles up the beach and practice there, Rannals said. Several miles of sand are state parkland, and the few that aren't are saddled with environmental restrictions.

The one remaining open space buffer between San Diego County and metropolitan Los Angeles, Camp Pendleton is one of the richest depositories of nature in Southern California. Driven out elsewhere by the relentless urban march, Southwestern arroyo toads, California gnatcatchers and least Bell's vireo birds thrive on the base. Their homes are protected by federal law.

An airport also could shut down the base's air field in the flood-prone Santa Margarita River Valley, where 180 helicopters are stationed and F-18 fighters drop in for coordinated air-land-sea exercises.

And it would force the relocation of the Edson Range weapons training area, where 17,000 recruits from the San Diego Marine Corps Recruit Depot learn how to shoot.

Moving families

One of the working group's criteria for eliminating sites was family relocation: sites requiring the moving of 5,000 homes were scrapped. The airport consultant's analysis says only 740 base residents would need to be moved if an airport was built at Pendleton.

But Rannals challenges those numbers, arguing that the entire community of Stuart Mesa, population 5,000, would have to be relocated, not to mention a new community center, child-care center and elementary school.

Then there are barracks that house 2,500 Marines at Edson Range and 1,200 at Camp Las Flores. That's close to 9,000 people in all who would have to be moved, Rannals said.

"Realistically, we should have been eliminated on that criterion alone," he said. "We believe we were vastly underestimated, as far as the residents who would be impacted."

Shafer-Payne said the consultant's numbers, which came from the San Diego Association of Governments a couple of years ago, may be outdated. But she stressed they did not ignore the base residents.

"There is no distinction between people living on and off base," Shafer-Payne said. "Military families are being treated exactly the same way as civilian residents."

Air conflicts

Choosing another site on Pendleton would be nearly impossible, military officials and airport consultants agree. Eighty percent of the 125,000 acres is mountainous and the flat coastal strip is rather narrow.

And even if planners could shoehorn an airport somewhere else, commercial-jet flying patterns would clash directly with military air space. Civilian planes are restricted below 15,000 feet over much of the base, and for good reason: The Marines practice for wars by launching live bombs in paths that arc several miles across the sky and reach several thousand feet above sea level.

"We have no air space left to support a commercial airport," Rannals said. "We're blanketed."

Coexistence

There is no doubt military operations would be affected in a big way, but Wear of San Diego contends that does not mean Pendleton and an airport could not coexist. He suggested that, if Pendleton were pursued, military and aviation experts would figure out a way to plan an airport in a way that does not compromise the base's mission.

"With 125,000 acres you would think they could accommodate those activities on the base in some other form," Wear said.

As for the Stuart Mesa housing, Edson Range and other facilities potentially in the path of the bulldozer, "all of that would have to be relocated and paid for," he said.

An airport that served greater Southern California would be particularly strong economically because of its large market, Wear said, and it would generate plenty of money to cover the costs.

Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 740-3529 or ddowney@nctimes.com.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2003/09/28/news/top_stories/9_27_0322_20_13.txt


Sempers,

Roger
:marine:

thedrifter
09-30-03, 06:04 AM
Report suggests East Miramar for airport list

Staff says to abandon 'floating' terminal idea


By Jeff Ristine
STAFF WRITER

September 27, 2003


A report to the board of the county's new airport agency recommends adding a fifth military location, East Miramar, to the list of finalists for a possible regional airport site.

A fanciful offshore "floating airport," however, should be dropped from consideration because building an airfield out to sea poses too many untested engineering challenges, the staff report said.

Following up on the work of a 32-member advisory panel, the report also calls for a public vote on an airport proposal Nov. 7, 2006, ending any thought a ballot measure might be ready next year.

The report goes to the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority board of directors for a meeting Thursday that will set the focus for Phase II of the site-selection process, the latest but most comprehensive of at least 30 airport-related studies undertaken since 1955.

It recommends the nine-member board zero in on four San Diego County military sites – Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, East Miramar, North Island Naval Air Station and Camp Pendleton – plus March Air Reserve Base in Riverside County, the Imperial County desert and a cross-border facility using Tijuana International Airport.

All but the East Miramar location were on a list drawn up by the advisory panel, called the Public Working Group.

With three of the sites – Tijuana, Camp Pendleton and North Island – some sort of continuing operation at Lindbergh Field could be feasible, the report said.

In these scenarios, also subject to further analysis, the present-day airport might continue to offer flights to nearby destinations or serve as a passenger portal to North Island or Tijuana.

By the time the matter reaches a ballot, said Airport Authority president and CEO Thella Bowens, "We're going to be able to say that we have done an exhaustive analysis of all the issues surrounding every one of these sites."

The report accepts most of the recommendations of the advisory panel, which wrapped up two years of analysis earlier this month.

The panel applied a variety of environmental-and human-impact criteria to identify "fatal flaws" among 16 proposed airport sites that had included Ramona, National City, Carlsbad and Oceanside.

Under the panel's criteria, the East Miramar site – east of Interstate 15 and north of state Route 52 – dropped off the list because its hills and canyons would require enormous amounts of earth to move to flatten the land.

But Angela Shafer-Payne, vice president of strategic planning for the Regional Airport Authority, said the staff decided East Miramar deserves further analysis.

Analysts estimated 302 million cubic yards of "fill" would be required to smooth out the site, and they placed the amount of "cut" to hills and other terrain at 269 million cubic yards. If further study suggests the dirt can be moved easily from one part of the site to another, she said, developing it might be more feasible than the seemingly enormous figures suggest.

There were no such concessions for the floating airport idea, however, proposed by a business called Float Inc., for a location three to five miles off the tip of Point Loma.

While Shafer-Payne said many of the airport site plans involve thinking "outside the box," the floating airport was deemed unworkable for a variety of reasons, including constantly changing ocean conditions, high winds and occasionally dense fog.

A floating tunnel or causeway providing access to the floating airport "would pose engineering challenges heretofore untested," and a proposal to allow parking and other functions under the runways would require substantial structural reinforcement to prevent bomb damage, it said.

The risk of spending millions of dollars studying a proposal that might prove impossible at any cost was also a factor, the officials said.

Meanwhile, the proposed military sites have much different problems: none are currently available for civilian use.

Department of Defense representatives have said joint use is utterly infeasible at Miramar, North Island or Camp Pendleton. The East Miramar site, representatives told the advisory group last month, has been envisioned for military housing that wasn't identified in a statistical analysis of the 16 proposed airport sites.

"We are very much aware of their plans and their concerns," Bowens said of the military. "We agree with a lot of people in San Diego County that the military is very important, and we're not going to ignore that."

At next week's meeting, beginning at 9 a.m. Thursday at the Hilton Airport/Harbor Island Hotel, the authority board will be free to add or delete any number of sites to the staff's recommended list for more study.

By early November, Bowens said, she will ask the board of directors to approve a consultant to conduct the next phase of site analysis. The Airport Authority hopes to draw a Federal Aviation Administration grant to cover 80 percent to 90 percent of the cost, and has budgeted up to $1.8 million of its own money to use through June 30, 2004.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeff Ristine: (619) 542-4580; jeff.ristine@uniontrib.com

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/uniontrib/sat/metro/news_7m27airport.html


Sempers,

Roger
:marine:

marine5
10-09-03, 06:06 PM
AH BIG BUSINESS at its finest...