Published Thursday, May 22, 2003, in the San Jose Mercury News

Audit criticizes S.F. Airport on runway plan
Lavish spending on consultants cited in report to supervisors

By Marilee Enge
Mercury News

San Francisco International Airport's $75 million effort to expand
its runways focused too heavily on marketing the idea, spent too
lavishly on consultants and failed to give equal weight to
alternatives to paving San Francisco Bay, according to a highly
critical audit of the project released Wednesday.

While the airport was evaluating the controversial -- and now dead --
plan to build new runways in the bay, consultants were billing for
$4,000 flights to the East Coast, $500 hotel rooms and $16,000
computer work stations, according to a sampling of expenses examined
by Harvey Rose, budget analyst for the San Francisco supervisors.

The airport spent money on services that had little to do with
studying the environmental impacts of expanding the airfield, and
items such as public relations and lobbying were sometimes hidden in
contracts for engineering or environmental work, according to the
audit.

The report recommends giving the San Francisco Board of Supervisors
more oversight of runway expansion, improving public information and
community feedback, and changing the airport's policies for using
subcontractors, among other things.

"It confirms there was very little fiscal accountability in the
Airfield Development Bureau," said Supervisor Aaron Peskin, a
longtime critic of the runway project. "Much of the money was spent
not on studying the airport but selling it to the people of San
Francisco."

The financial analysis was made public as airport director John
Martin announced he would withdraw his request for several million
dollars to complete environmental studies and maintain a small staff
to manage future development. The United Airlines bankruptcy and post-
Sept. 11 travel slump made the expansion moot, and Martin said the
Airfield Development Program will end in June and nothing more will
be spent on research.

Killing the runway project is a victory for environmental critics,
who have long maintained that the airport ignored alternatives to
filling the bay as it pursued a dream of building new runways to
solve flight delay problems. Rose's report supports that conclusion,
saying officials and consultants focused on the benefits of runway
expansion and the drawbacks of the alternatives in meetings with the
public.

"This failure by the airport to present to the public all available
information on the alternatives being considered in the Runway
Reconfiguration Project indicates that the public meetings process
was managed as an advocacy campaign to sway public opinion rather
than as an unbiased education process," the report says.

But airport officials deny they tried to sway the public into support
of paving the bay.

"The airport did not take an advocacy role ever on building runways
in the bay," said spokeswoman Kandace Bender. "To this date the
airport has not made a decision on a preferred alternative. We have
never said if we should build or what we should build."

A random sample of billings by consultants found $799.55 at Bacchanal
Restaurant in South San Francisco, with no explanation for the cost;
$1,039 for gifts in connection with a trip to Hong Kong, Singapore
and Hawaii; $49,940 for three Dell workstations; and $4,252 for one
airfare between the San Francisco Airport and Washington, D.C.

Bender said these were exceptions, but Rose concludes that a wider
sample would probably produce similar examples.

The budget analyst also found a widespread practice
called "seconding," in which principal contractors were given broad
license to hire subcontractors with little explanation for the work.
Among those was a $108,972 contract to political consultant Dan
Schnur paid by DMC Airfield Engineers.

Environmentalists said Wednesday the audit confirms their suspicions
that the airport was pushing runway expansion in the guise of
environmental research.

"They didn't look at alternatives they should have looked at, they
didn't treat the public honestly and they didn't look at the big
picture," said attorney Amy Quirk, who represents a coalition of
organizations known as the Alliance for a Clean Waterfront. "What are
the Bay Area's transportation needs? How can they be met efficiently
without destroying the bay?"

But business leaders said the work was valuable and they are
disappointed that research into new runways is coming to a halt.

"It doesn't even allow an informed debate to occur in the future over
whether modernization at SFO should go forward," said Sunne McPeak,
president of the Bay Area Council, which represents the region's
largest employers.

"If we're not prepared to accommodate a diverse global economy, it's
going to translate into a much less prosperous region than if we have
good, safe infrastructure."


Contact Marilee Enge at menge@... or (415) 394-6895.