Earlier than I would like, since I’m a night person, but since they refused to abide by my schedule, I’ve had to abide by theirs.
So the prospect of losing 15 more minutes of sleep daily not only started my day badly but hit me as a violation of the settlement under which JWA operates.
So I called Ayres Boyd who heads up the Airport Working Group, which has been in the trenches fighting off the expansionists for many years, to find out if they were on top of this one. And I got my sleep back.
Turns out that 6:45 isn’t take-off time. It’s get-ready time. It’s getting in line, revving up for morning rush hour at 7.
But while I had him, I asked Boyd what kind of response the Working Group got to a Forum piece in the Pilot — co-signed by AirFare and Stop Polluting Our Newport — that laid out a specific, rational regional transportation plan to resolve the problem of over-burdened airports, particularly JWA.
“Very little,” he said, “and none from Newport Beach where the noise problem is greatest. And no response, either, from the Newport Beach-Costa Mesa partnership to address JWA problems and plans.
“It doesn’t seem to be a top level issue in either city, nor does our effort to seek a means to buy the adjacent golf course property to prevent its use for a runway extension to accommodate larger planes.”
All of this is being played off against an ongoing $650-million construction project that has turned into a semantic game between the various factions.
Airport officials refer to the construction as “improvement,” while the Working Group calls it ”expansion” and is keeping a jaundiced eye on it while strongly questioning the timing of allowing a project of this size and dubious need to go forward in the economic crisis we all face today.
