Airport Noise Foes Display Clout With Pact Limiting Jets

Homeowners in Newport Beach won a nearly unprecedented victory last month when the Federal Aviation Administration pledged to support an agreement that would place strict limits on commercial jet use of John Wayne Airport over the next 20 years.

It was, Airport Manager Murry L. Cable said, the only place in the nation in which the federal government had agreed to waive its traditional demands for open access to federally funded airports for all commercial carriers.

Said one FAA official: “If somebody came up to us and proposed this same kind of thing in, say, Des Moines, we’d say no way. . . . But we know enough about Orange County, and the history of Orange County, and the politics of Orange County, that we can say this is a pretty good deal.”

Campaign Has Worked

The reality is that Newport Beach and its residents have spent well over $1.2 million combatting airport noise, and it has worked.

The Orange County Airport Working Group organization and its fellow chapters in San Francisco, Fresno, Burbank, Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego--comprising 75,000 formal members--are widely recognized as the best-organized network of airport opponents in the nation.

“We have just become a very large cooperative organization because it seems that people who live around airports, throughout the state and throughout the entire country, are experiencing the same problems. We felt that with an identity of interests, we could be more efficient and more effective,” said Barbara Lichman, executive director of the Orange County group and co-chairman of the state organization.

Limits for 20 Years

The Orange County group has chalked up a number of important victories over the years, first with a 1982 Superior Court decision that rejected environmental documentation for an expansion plan at John Wayne Airport and established a lid on daily jet operations at 41 flights. The recently negotiated settlement, still to be ratified by the federal court, will limit passengers at John Wayne Airport to 8.4 million a year over the next 20 years.

Airport officials credit much of the organization’s success to the makeup of its members.

“John Wayne Airport is not a real airport in a sense,” Cable explained. “At most airports, the goal is to serve the traveling public in a safe and efficient manner. . . . But I don’t think there are 10 airports across the country that have a constituency that’s as intelligent and vocal and well-organized as ours is.”

Different Perceptions

Studies have repeatedly shown that affluent neighborhoods are much more effective in combatting noise of all types, and with a median family income of more than $54,000, Newport Beach qualifies.

“A community like Newport Beach would have the know-how and the money and the means to be annoyed about aircraft noise, whereas, what’s a few more operations a day at LAX or Chicago or New York in the scheme of things?” said one Los Angeles area noise consultant.

Residents in Orange County may not have the noise problem faced by homeowners near major international airports, but Lichman said they have a noise problem nonetheless.

“Beauty and ugliness is in the eye of the beholder. If you compare any problem to the Kennedy (N.Y.) problem, it diminishes in seriousness. You have to define your standard of what is a problem,” she said.