AS predictable as the summer pattern of afternoon low fog rolling in from the coast, and about as dense, the campaign to pave San Francisco Bay for new airport runways is again being pushed by the Democratic leadership and its big-business allies after a year of silence.Shamefully, local liberal politicians are subverting a Reagan-era environmental law that discourages bayfill. Gov. Davis recently appointed an anti-environmental zealot, former Sup. Barbara Kaufman, to chair the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, which is charged with protecting our bay.
Mayor Brown has dispatched a dream team of fixers and flacks to San Francisco International Airport to manufacture consent for this disaster-in-the-making, despite substantial counterevidence on the merits.
This megaproject would be a quick boon to union construction workers, but an emerging Blue-Green alliance is forming to balance the need for well-paying jobs with our responsibility as working folks to show solidarity with our fragile environment.
If we project the rate of cost overruns based on what we've seen in the International Terminal project, we're looking at $5 billion to $15 billion. If we instead diverted that money to mitigate the impacts of tourism and uncoordinated growth on San Francisco or the region, imagine the increase in our quality of life.
That this is billed as a runway reconfiguration project appears to violate the California Environmental Quality Act and the BCDC legislation, which require all no-build options to be exhausted before bayfill is even considered. The Airport Commission just applied to the Federal Aviation Administration to raise landing fees to pay for runways that are not yet justified.
No objective standards have been established to determine what interim mitigation would make it unnecessary to build into the bay. Were this actually an objective analysis, the airport would have investigated other approaches -- such as increasing landings per hour through enhanced radar, regional coordination, small craft diversion or other techniques -- to obviate the need for this environmental disaster.
Proponents of new runways argue that the airport, in its current configuration, has become a travel and economic bottleneck, but the recent overheating of the local economy contradicts that claim. The worst bottleneck in the local transit system is U.S. 101 and other terrestrial links.
The claim has been made that new runways are needed because the new generation of very large aircraft are unable to use existing runways. But on closer analysis, the A3XX line of large aircraft is marketed as compatible with existing runways. Although these big birds would need exclusive time on SFO's narrower taxiways, there is no enhanced taxiway proposal on the table -- and we are expected to pave the bay to accommodate what is estimated to be 0.8 percent of traffic.
The environmental impact on the communities of humans ringing the bay habitat remains unassessed because those communities are dispersed. In a spin game of "where she stops, nobody knows," people from westside San Francisco, the Peninsula, South and East bays are all but randomly targeted with having their homes come under the proposed flight paths of new runways.
The environmental studies of the hydrodynamics of the bay seem tailor-made to support building further into the bay, yet the study maps I've seen don't include the part of the bay south of the Dumbarton Bridge, which will be most negatively impacted by altering water flow at Millbrae.
One plan floated last year called for rehabilitating the Cargill salt ponds lining the southern margin of the bay in exchange for any environmental damage caused by building new runways. While we would all like to see the salt ponds rehabilitated, the price tag for that -- which should be borne by Cargill rather than served up as corporate welfare -- will run into the hundreds of millions of dollars and take the better part of a century to reclaim. The effect of new runways on that proposed swap and rate of rehabilitation have yet to be studied.
Air travel challenges many of nature's laws, and we can't expect everything to work out right at all times given nature's sacred chaos. We have already filled in one third of the former San Francisco Bay, and to expect that we have the right to sacrifice the habitat of the immediate wetlands surrounding the airport as well as create unintended consequences on the diverse ecosystems at other parts of the bay in violation of Reagan-era environmental laws is retrograde thinking that has no place in the 21st century Bay Area.
While the fog rolls in during the afternoon in the summer pattern, it also clears to the coast by midday. It's our responsibility to demand that politicians clearly cut through the fog of disinformation and propaganda that is forcing this ill-advised project through at jet speed.
