1999 The year in review

Runner, SR Technics lead AV news

Aircraft firm's announcement selected top story of year

By VERN LAWSON
Valley Press Managing Editor

By acclamation, the Valley Press staff has proclaimed the preChristmas announcement that SR Technics, the heavy maintenance arm of SAirGroup, will open a jobcreating aircraft maintenance and repair facility in Palmdale as the top story of 1999.

SR Technics was spun off from SwissAir in 1997, hoping to work on more than SwissAir's own fleet, and has grown by 20% each year since.

It anticipates that about 1,000 jobs will be opened by June by SR Technics America Ltd., the firm's U.S. arm, and as many as 6,000 positions over the next half-decade.

Although it was highly dramatic and holiday timely, the SR Technics story tops off a year of economic levitation in the Antelope Valley that makes the recession earlier in the decade seem like a fading memory.

Embraced by the more expansive definition of the top story of 1999 are these developments:

Rite Aid opened its huge distribution warehouse in the Fox Field corridor in Lancaster.

Michaels began distribution of merchandise to regional stores from its new facility on Avenue H, near 30th Street West.

At the Antelope Valley Mall, Dillard's two-story department store added a sixth sizable anchor to the Valley's enclosed, eclectic shopping center.

Also in Palmdale, construction is well under way on a mammoth Lowe's home improvement center, a Barnes & Noble bookstore, a Starbucks coffeehouse, a Linens N'Things fabrics outlet and two new Marriott hotels.

The city of Palmdale began construction of new, expansive city hall facilities and a courthouse that will accommodate four civil court rooms.

Opening this year in Lancaster were a 22-screen Cinemark theater and the Wayne Gretzky Roller Hockey Center, and ground was broken for the new $18.3 million, 135-acre Antelope Valley Fair site on Avenue H, just west of the AV Freeway.

All in all, the Valley Press staff agrees that the resurgence of the Antelope Valley economy constitutes the overall top story of 1999.

But there were other stories that created banner headlines in the past 12 months in this newspaper. Not in any particular order, they included:

Diana Beard-Williams was fired from her position with the Palmdale School District and as director of the Palmdale Education Foundation after months of acrimonious debate.

Los Angeles County Sheriff's sergeant Kevin Carney was arrested on suspicion of molesting a teenage girl. The arrest occurred four days before he was elected to the Palmdale City Council. Carney resigned from the Sheriff's Department, but at year's end no charges had been filed.

Boeing rolled out its joint strike fighter prototypes in Palmdale. The company is competing with Lockheed Martin, which is developing its JSF prototypes at the Palmdale Skunk Works.

Kathleen Soliah, a Palmdale High School graduate, was arrested in Minnesota and charged with planting bombs under police cars in 1975 when the Symbionese Liberation Army was active. Now legally known as Sara Jane Olson, she is awaiting trial and is free on $1 million bail provided by a number of individuals.

In a joint announcement with Palmdale city officials, Los Angeles leaders promised a high-level marketing and development program to reopen operations at the Palmdale Regional Airport.

The Moving Wall of Vietnam was displayed in Palmdale for one full week and was visited by thousands of Valley residents.

Assemblyman George Runner - one of the most active members of the Legislature - continued his long-term effort to realign the cities of Lancaster and Palmdale to eliminate the costly, competitive incentive programs used to lure new businesses to their particular municipalities.

The Antelope Valley Republican Assembly, the most powerful partisan political group in north Los Angeles County, helped place a dozen of the 18 candidates the group endorsed in the Nov. 2 election. The other guiding presence behind most of the wins were Antelope Valley businessman Frank Visco and attorney R. Rex Parris, who endorsed and supported a number of the same candidates as AVRA.

The Antelope Valley Union High School and the Southern Kern Unified Districts both failed to gain the necessary two-thirds votes for bond issues to build new schools and improve existing campuses.

Portions of the Antelope Valley Freeway long-range widening project were completed, easing some of the heavy traffic congestion that local commuters face each workday.

Throughout the year, local leaders lobbied at meeting after meeting to route California's proposed high-speed rail line through the Antelope Valley as opposed to using an alignment paralleling Interstate 5. No definite route had been picked at year's end, but the AV proposal appeared to be running in second place.

Cheryl Burnham of Lancaster was ordered to pay Los Angeles County $97,972 after she made about 2,600 calls to psychic hotlines while a county employee, running up a phone tab of $120,000.

Alvina Rankins, a Palmdale woman convicted of felonies ranging from grand theft to arson, acquired a license to operate a daycare facility and ran it in the Valley for two years.

Six people were killed when massive concrete pipes rolled off a truck east of Boron.

A jury found Littlerock resident Doreen Gutierrez guilty of second-degree murder for crushing to death her longtime lesbian lover's 8-year-old daughter. A drunken Gutierrez ran down and killed Sara Criado with her 19foot-long 1974 Oldsmobile Cutlass in 1998 following an argument with the little girl's mother.

The area code for most Antelope Valley residents was changed from 805 to 661.

The Palmdale-built B-2 stealth bomber completed a number of highly successful missions over Yugoslavia, bombing strategic targets during 30-hour, nonstop flights from their base in Missouri.

Five Antelope Valley teenagers were killed in a freeway accident south of Palmdale.

A Palmdale man, Airman 1st Class Justin Wotasik, was one of 12 airmen killed in a midair crash of two Air Force helicopters near Las Vegas.

Uploaded January 3, 1999