Some Help Versus None

The Los Angeles City Council agreed last week on a partial solution to noise problems at Van Nuys Airport. Given the alternative--no solution--they made the right choice.

At issue was a proposed ordinance to cap the number of noisy older jets based at Van Nuys, the busiest general aviation airport in the country. City officials, airport operators and homeowner groups have squabbled over these older, so-called Stage 2 planes--which are far noisier than newer Stage 3 aircraft--for decades.

Homeowners, tired of the thunder of jets overhead, want the older planes banished, period. Airport operators, mindful of the millions of business dollars at stake, want no restrictions, period.

Neither side liked the proposal put before the council by the city’s Board of Airport Commissioners to cap Stage 2 jets at the number based there now, which is about 50.

That would be 50 too many, according to homeowners groups. But turnover records suggest the planes won’t remain there forever. And although a plane that is retired or relocated in the first years of the cap could be replaced by another Stage 2 jet, replacements won’t be granted a permanent exemption and would have to be removed by 2011.

For aviation interests that complain the cap will cost the San Fernando Valley millions in lost business, the 10-year time frame is fair warning to plan ahead and budget for replacing aging jets.

It’s simplistic to say that because neither side likes the cap, it must be a good compromise. But each side’s opposition does underscore how difficult it is to find a solution when the two are so completely at odds with each other--and both view compromise as a defeat. Witness the Valley’s other decades-long airport dispute. Burbank city and airport officials have all but given up on a tentative agreement to start work on a new Burbank Airport terminal this year. There, even partial solutions have proven elusive.

What finally decided last week’s City Council vote was the realization that the city charter did not allow council members to tinker with the proposal; they could only approve it or send it back to the airport commissioners. The last time the council turned down a cap proposal it took more than two years for the commissioners to return with a new one. That was two more years of doing nothing about noise at Van Nuys Airport. And something is better than nothing.