Santa Monica Airport closure agreement leaves plenty to fight about
By Beige Luciano-Adams
Following years of public sparring and weeks of closed-door negotiations, Santa Monica announced over the weekend that it has reached a deal with the Federal Aviation Administration to close Santa Monica Airport on Dec. 31, 2028.
News of the consent decree left stakeholders on both sides of the debate smarting. Aviation advocates decried the future closure while resident groups seeking to end flight operations vowed to fight the agreement in court. The city declared, “SMO will close forever in 2028”; dissenters countered “SMO will stay open” for 11 more years.
In the tug of war for total dominion — the city’s right to close SMO at will and turn much of the land into public park space versus the FAA’s right to operate flight traffic in perpetuity — Santa Monica officials maintain the compromise offered a gracious and controlled exit from a tangle of complex, protracted litigation with an uncertain outcome.
But even as the ink dries, some observers doubt we’ve seen the end of the fight over SMO.
Why 2028?
“It was much less time than they wanted, and much more than we wanted,” Santa Monica City Manager Rick Cole said of the 11 years the airport will remain open, a timeline that exceeds the FAA’s recent claim that SMO was obligated by the terms of a federal grant to operate until at least 2023. “And we would’ve never agreed to it if not for the immediate relief.”
That relief includes allowing the city to shorten the runway — at its own cost — from 5,000 to 3,500 feet, which officials expect will significantly reduce the scope of operations and flight traffic.
Even in the best of cases, Cole said, pending litigation would have prevented the city from shortening the runway for several more years. Now they expect to have it done in three to six months, depending on the design process.
While a 3,500-foot runway eliminates whole classes of jets, Cole is confident that other red tape (weight limitations, insurance factors) will further dampen the airport’s lure and “cause some of the current users to reexamine using our airport.”
The agreement also concedes the city’s right to provide fixed-based operations (FBOs) at the airport – and renders pending litigation over the eviction of two FBO vendors moot. In an apparent technicality, it requires the city to offer all current tenants leases “of no less than three years but allows Santa Monica to terminate any and all leases with only six months’ notice — a move the current administration fully intends to make.
“We’ll sit down to negotiate what we hope will be an orderly transition,” Cole said. “All of those [decisions] will begin to impact who uses SMO, and I think will dramatically reverse the increase of jet traffic.”
Los Angeles City Councilmember Mike Bonin, who represents Venice and West L.A. neighborhoods impacted by SMO traffic, was not convinced. In an emailed statement, he cited “the devil in the details” and “grave concerns” that the agreement fails to protect constituents’ health and safety, including failure to dedicate 1,000-foot runway buffer zones for residents.
“As far as I can tell from the details I have seen, there is no agreement to actually close the airport in 2029 — just an agreement to keep the airport open until then,” Bonin wrote.
A reading of the consent decree, however, appears to indicate otherwise — clearly stating that both parties agree the city can, “in its sole discretion at any time on or after Jan. 1, 2029, cease to operate the airport as an airport and may close the airport to all aeronautical use forever.” At least as long as the city doesn’t take any more grant money from the FAA.
The city’s current leadership has made its intentions to close the airport clear. Whether a future administration could reverse course, however, seems a valid question.
Continued Dissent
Immediately following the City Council’s vote (4 to 3 in favor) on the agreement, Councilman Kevin McKeown added his dissenting opinion to the minutes:
“With this settlement, we snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. This, at a time when the FAA’s willingness to negotiate revealed that the FAA itself suspected they would lose their court battles with Santa Monica — even while they continue to hold our land hostage,” he wrote.
Jonathan Stein, an attorney representing several resident-owner groups, accused the city of acting unlawfully and announced his intention to
file actions in state and federal courts.
“It’s a terrible deal that will impact residents. We want to make sure all aviation tenants are thrown out, leaving only the runway. We then want to show in court that the runway can be shut down lawfully by the city by Dec, 31, 2018, as the city council already decided,” Stein said.
Stein and other opponents argue that the city would have prevailed in its legal claims against the federal government, and thus question the merit of compromising. He also claims the city did not comply with public disclosure requirements.
“They were so concerned with hiding the content of the agreement from residents of Sunset Park and Ocean Park that they failed to do even the minimum disclosures you need under the Brown Act when you’re changing public properties,” Stein said.
“John [Stein] is just wrong on that,” countered Cole, saying the city fully complied with the Brown Act.
He argued bringing the FAA to the table was the best way out of a complex litigation schedule that included court battles in the 9th Circuit, 9th District and Court of Appeals; five pending cases, a notice of investigation and an interim cease-and-desist from the FAA; the eviction of two tenants; and a cease-and-desist order the city was preparing to file against a tenant last week.
About That Park
Airport proponents are fueling speculation that SMO’s closure is playing into the hands of rapacious developers, but Cole is adamant that a 2014 charter amendment prevents any commercial or residential redevelopment of airport land — anything other than “recreational, cultural and educational use” — without a citywide public vote.
Some of the airport buildings will be “adaptively reused” for such purposes, and the city fully intends to capitalize on having tenants like Snapchat to pay for the construction and maintenance of the public park space that many airport closure advocates would like to see.
“There’ll be no expansion of those uses, but the benefits of maintaining its revenue will help build the kind of quality of park we’re looking to build,” Cole said.
While McKeown criticized what he sees as a 12-year delay for Airport Park, Cole pointed to another highlight of the agreement: Santa Monica will be able to begin snagging bits of land to jumpstart the park expansion well before 2028.
Then again, 12 years is a long time.
“City councils come and go, so I don’t think this ends the process — it probably just starts it again,” said Bob Hajek, a veteran aviation attorney who was surprised by the agreement.
“I think putting a deadline of 2029 means political pressure now goes into the city arena rather than the federal government arena,” he said. “I don’t think this ends the fight. I think it just focuses it to parties that need to be involved.”
This is an updated version of the email we sent earlier this month. Click here to view on the SMAA website.
Santa Monica Airport Air Quality Monitoring Contract May Benefit Airport Commissioner and Her Associate
In a rush to spend $54,000 out of the Airport Fund to placate the airport commission, the City of Santa Monica stated in a press release, “Tufts University (in Boston) was selected to perform an air quality study through a competitive bid process.” The process of awarding the contract was “expedited” according to Airport Commission meeting recordings.
“The City of Santa Monica is commissioning an independent academic study of pollution levels emanating from Santa Monica Airport, coinciding with the temporary runway shortening construction closure,” said City Manager Rick Cole.
Former Santa Monica Airport Commissioner, Suzanne Paulson, a known anti airport politician, asked the City of Santa Monica to finance an air quality study at Santa Monica Airport (KSMO). The goal was to, “update the air quality study conducted by the South Coast Air Quality Management District (AQMD).” Paulson presented a document titled, “Air Quality Impact Experiment Proposal” to the City.
Council member Sue Himmelrich voiced support for conducting the study, saying it would provide the City with a baseline, since the study would include the period when KSMO was closed. Himmelrich said, “It would be best that it not be performed by a current airport commissioner, ” which may have led to Paulson’s resignation. Paulson recused herself from the August 28th 2017 Airport Commission meeting, while the discussion of funding this study took place.
It is not clear how Tufts University is “independent” since Scott Fruin, from USC (an associate of Suzanne Paulson) is on site administrating this study. The Santa Monica City Manager’s office has made it abundantly clear that Paulson is not getting paid directly by the city under the current air quality contract with Tufts University. Senior City staff said, “Paulson submitted a proposal that was too expensive…we could not afford UCLA.”
To be competitive, Tufts would have to outsource the complicated tasks of installing, maintaining and insuring the integrity of the air quality measuring equipment. It would not be cost effective to ship monitoring stations and travel from Boston to oversee the installation process and gather the data. Paulson was privy to the budget parameters for the proposed study, since she wrote the proposal, so it is surprising the contract would go to a vendor 3000 miles away. A person working on the study said, “Suzanne will be collaborating on this study.”
When the AQMD study was done in 2010, there were six test sites. One site was located in Central Los Angeles as a control. The results of the AQMD study stated there were, “no significant differences between air quality on, near or far from the airport locations.”
The new Tufts University contract has only two air quality monitoring sites, less than 500 feet apart, and no control location.
These two sites are heavily subjected to ground transportation from Bundy Drive and the I-10 and I-405 freeway interchange, the busiest freeway interchange in North America. The data gathering did not start until after airport construction (to shorten the runway) was grinding up concrete and airport tarmac and the Thomas and Skirball fires were contaminating the air. With the fires, strong winds, and Temporary Flight Restrictions for firefighting aircraft, there were less than 10% of the normal flight operations at the Santa Monica Airport. A KSMO air traffic controller said, “operators don’t want to fly with TFRs, smoke, and turbulence. We have had very limited jet traffic.”
Scott Fruin, (USC professor), was working at the monitoring site located on the east side of the airport on January 3rd. He acknowledged, “based on when these units were installed and all that was going on, [fires and construction] it may be challenging to find valuable data.” Fruin has been a long-term collaborator with Suzanne Paulson, a UCLA professor. Fruin and Paulson have published studies together, including papers on Santa Monica Airport air quality and have been quoted together in news articles, including a Los Angeles Times Article on freeway pollution, published Dec 30th, 2017.
This recent LA Times article states that sites within 1,000 feet of any freeway are generally highest in pollution, and associated with rising rates of asthma, cancer, and a growing list of other associated health problems. Another article published by UCLA environmental health researchers shows findings of harmful pollutants 1.5 miles away from the I-10 freeway. There is broad consensus that freeway pollution impacts the entire Santa Monica Airport footprint as well as surrounding communities.
One of the two air-monitoring stations in this current study is set up in the backyard of an anti-airport activist who has lived (in the same house) within 500 feet the Santa Monica Airport for decades. She had one of the six air-sampling monitors at her home in 2010 when AQMD did their study. Before the runway was shortened, this property was within what the FAA calls an “approach Runway Protection Zone”. A new airport would not have homes located within a RPZ.
Many property owners adjacent to the Santa Monica Airport have been patiently waiting for an airport closure. Two homes were recently built on Dewey Street, less than 500 feet West of the airport. These homes sold in 2017 for over $3.5 Million and each homeowner is now paying over $36,000 in annual property taxes. Many people involved with Santa Monica Airport politics call the controversy “an old-fashioned land grab.”
Currently, the City of Santa Monica has not fully resolved a Part 16 Complaint with the FAA that addresses over $6 Million of misappropriated funds that were diverted out of the airport fund. This new air quality study appears to be another politically-motivated diversion of funds. The Santa Monica Airport Commission has no active pilots or members with any pertinent aviation experience. Many of the recent commission members live close to the airport. This new $54,000 air quality study appears to be crippled by politics dictating science.
Without a control measurement and minimal jet traffic, combined with the added pollution of forest fires and airport construction, it will be unlikely for any meaningful scientific data to be extracted from air quality measuring equipment.
The extensive AQMD study in 2010 concluded, “Long-term average concentrations near…KSMO were generally similar to, and often lower than, those measured elsewhere in the South Coast Air Basin.”
On January 20, 2018, there was an electric airplane presentation at the Santa Monica Airport Museum of Flying by Sun Flyer Aircraft. A Santa Monica business has placed a deposit on a Sun Flyer electric airplane that should be flying at the Santa Monica Airport within two years. Electric airplanes would not register on an air quality study, since they do not exhaust any gases or particulates. A resident living under the flight path said, “the future of aviation at the Santa Monica Airport will be electric aircraft since they are nearly silent in operation and will serve the community’s interests.”
While working on the air quality testing equipment at the east end of the airport, Fruin was asked what happens to the results of this air quality study, “Ultimately the City is the client and they get to decide if they release part of the data or any data at all. They could also choose to not release anything.”
Locations of air monitoring equipment
smo-air-quailty-1.png
smo-air-quailty-2.png
SantaMonicaAirportAssociation
http://www.santamonicaairport.info/