Updated Tuesday, September 30, 2008, 7:49 AM--scroll down for ICE article
SPECIAL JOINT SESSION OF THE COSTA MESA AND NEWPORT BEACH CITY COUNCILS TODAY AT 4:00 PM
John Wayne Airport
The major item on the two item agenda is cooperation by and between the two cities on keeping John Wayne Airport from destroying both cities by continually growing.
LINKTrain to plane
The plan that many people are pushing is a train to plane plan.
The idea is that you'd go to John Wayne Airport, enter the terminal and get on a train (or bus) that would take you to an airport in San Bernardino or Riverside. Here's the paragraph in the Memorandum of Understanding that will probably be signed today about this:
J. In cooperation with the Orange County Board of Supervisors and other public agencies, actively support development and implementation of proposals that enable Orange County residents and businesses to conveniently access underused out-of-county airports using roadway improvements and air passenger rail links.
The CM PRESS believes that this may not be the best solution.
By leaving paragraph J as it is, we are putting all our eggs in this one train to plane basket just as we once put all our eggs in an airport at El Toro basket. And, you may recall how all those El Toro eggs got smashed.
To paragraph J. we would add the following after rail links, "and pursue other alternative proposals that may include, but not be limited to, the possibility of building a new international airport on a portion of Camp Pendleton."
Why Camp Pendleton makes sense
The CM PRESS Camp Pendleton proposal would only use about 3% of Camp Pendleton. The rest of the present base (97% ) would continue as a military base.
Consider:
John Wayne Airport is 501 acres.
Los Angeles International Airport is 3, 425 acres.
Camp Pendleton is 125,000 acres and has 17 miles of coastline.
In other words, you could fit about 250 John Wayne Airports or 36 Los Angeles International Airports on Camp Pendleton.
Take just a tiny 3% of Camp Pendleton and build a state of the art, 100-year-airport there.
This 3% would be 3, 750 acres.
That's 325 acres larger than LAX and 3, 249 acres larger than JWA!
Plus, the planes can take off over the ocean.
This new airport at Camp Pendleton would also have easy freeway access and we wouldn't need to send people on trains into the middle of the desert to get on planes.
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ANOTHER ADVANTAGE OF TRAINING LOCAL COPS IN ICE TECHNIQUES
When a local police department sends cops for the five week training in ICE techniques, they not only then have cops right in the department who can question suspects about their citizenship, but
the department gets access to the ICE data base to quickly determine who is here legally and who isn't.
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Those are our opinions. Thanks for reading them.
