Palmdale must annex airport parcel

Editorial Focus: Palmdale needs to annex several thousand acres of the L.A. World Airports' land in order to keep its promise to SR Technics and help attract other job-creating industries. The city of Los Angeles should assist - not resist - this progressive process.

The City Council last January approved annexing 4,545 of the 17,500 acres the city of Los Angeles owns east of Air Force Plant 42 so Palmdale could provide financial incentives to airport-related businesses.

Palmdale's motivation in seeking to annex the land was to make good on a promise to provide up to $5.4 million in financial assistance to the aircraft maintenance and refurbishment company SR Technics America Ltd.

The move also would position the city to provide assistance to other flight-related firms, such as BAE SYSTEMS Flight Systems.

SR Technics picked up the lease from Boeing on property where Rockwell in the 1980s built 100 B-1B bombers.

Rockwell - which was later acquired by Boeing - had originally leased the property from Los Angeles World Airports on the southwest corner of the L.A.'s 17,700-acre spread purchased since 1968 for a future airport.

Palmdale Mayor Jim Ledford said that bringing that land into Palmdale's borders may be essential to the city's ability to continue luring new companies to the community.

By June, negotiations with Los Angeles World Airports had reduced the size of the proposed annexation from 4,545 acres to 309 acres.

Now, LAWA officials prefer only the annexation of the actual footprint of SR Technics' 23acre hangar.

In a related action, L.A. World Airports is awaiting a federal grant for development of a cargo ramp at Palmdale Regional Airport, now on Air Force Plant 42 property under a lease agreement.

Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich offered no immediate solutions to the annexation matter, which will require the approval of the county's Local Agency Formation Commission.

But Antonovich has been a vocal supporter for the development of Palmdale Regional Airport.

"We're still pushing L.A. City to expand the Palmdale/Plant 42 and Ontario airports to meet the growth that ... already exists in this county," Antonovich said. "LAX is going to have approximately 35 million more passengers using that facility by the year 2015, and it's important that the Antelope Valley is part of the mitigation of LAX's over-crowdedness."

The City of Palmdale should be able to annex a large portion of L.A. World Airports' land in order to keep its promise to SR Technics and to assist other job-creating industries in locating in the Antelope Valley.

We fervently urge the Los Angeles World Airports' hierarchy to allow a reasonable amount of acreage to be annexed to the city of Palmdale so that industrial plants can be built on this valuable, unused 28-square-mile spread, far larger than Manhattan, a mere 22 square miles.