So, we, as a public utility are sort of a prisoner by the chain of events that has overtaken us over the years. Now, the one thing that we feel that we must do and my recommendation has been adopted by the Commission in this regard, is that any action that we take must be constructed, it must try to solve, or work toward the solving of this noise problem, but it must not restrict or impede the flow of commerce into this area until at least the time that other facilities are available to replace this one.

That does not seem to be in the offing since all of the other airports in the area tend to restrict their services and throw even more of a burden on Los Angeles International.

By that, I am thinking of Long Beach, Orange County, and some others. So, what do we do, then? As you know, we have some claims amounting to over $4 billion against the airport as a proprietor.

In terms of lawsuits, there is a pattern beginning to emerge from the court in the case of taking of property or damaging of property is becoming clear. There is, in fact, a taking and damage and these charges must be paid by the airport. Now, with regard to the nuisance that was mentioned earlier, and about which the city attorney recommended the closure of the airport, which I opposed.

We don't know yet what that means, contrary to what Ms. Russell has said, we do have some suits and they are beginning to be filed using nuisance as a basis of action.

Until the courts have established some precidents in that area, we are not sure what the impact of that will be financially. But, I can assure you by any criteria when we look at the cases and the precidents that is being set, the costs in the court of operating this airport are going to be very large.

Now, where does that money come from? That money comes from the users of the airport, it comes from the car rentals, the parking, the airline landing fees, and so forth. So, in effect the cost will eventually be borne by all of the users of the airport and it may well be more than the airlines can bear in terms of their ability to pay it.

Under our contracts with the airlines, these costs are paid through a landing fee agreement and are covered by those landing fee agree

ments.

With regard to the properties that were mentioned earlier this morning, the $25 million that Ms. Russell referred to is her appraisal of the line which she wishes to add to our current undertaking, but we have, and will have committed in excess probably of $130 million for land acquisition purposes by the time that this exercise is completed in the month of April. And, I will make that report to our city council joint committee on April 12, as to my recommendation for additional acquisition.

Land acquisition in itself is not the problem and not the answer to the problem. It is impossible to wipe out that many people on an acquisition procedure and all of the studies, in fact, have shown that there is just not that much demand for commercial and industrial zoning or compatible zoning within the entire impact are we are referring to.

Now, looking at the tremendous public concern here over noise in the city of Inglewood and other places, I just want to take, if I

may, just brief exception to the remarks made by Mayor Mergell in indicating that this department only responds to lawsuits.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This department has responded to the concern of people. The lawsuits we let take care of themselves in the court.

Looking at this problem and discussing this with leaders in all levels of government, national, local, State, and looking at the State law, which is still in effect in the State and which has not been overturned by the court, it was my recommendation to the Commission that we could no longer wait for the development of Federal criteria and standards dealing with the impact noise.

We must do something to convince reasonable people that we were making every effort possible to solve this problem within the powers that we have in a proprietorship.

I must say that I am sure that you understand that we are not clear what our powers are as a proprietor under the conflicting rulings from the courts. But, we do believe that there are certain things that we can do, so after a year and a half of discussions of this highly complex problem, I presented to our commission in December a five-point program which I felt at least did what a proprietor could do in terms of trying to reach reasonable answers for affected people and still not destroy an important part of the life-blood of these various communities.

We went to this five-point program, which you have already mentioned, Senator Cannon, a portion of, using the ocean at night for operations. We made those hours as liberal as we could from the standpoint of relief of noise, but we had to be guided by the Federal provisions on conflict in traffic.

Now, if we can resolve the conflict in traffic issue and save the issue for the masses of flights in the daytime, we would be among the first to recommend going over the ocean 24 hours a day.

The problem, however, is primarily a flight operation problem and one which has to be solved at the Federal level with the proper experts and the FAA in that regard. We have instituted that. We are proposing and have not yet adopted the official plan, but set only the policy of an incentive program, what the airlines call dollars for decibels, where, beginning at a reasonable time in the near future here, it will cost increasingly more to land a noisy aircraft and less to land a quiet aircraft.

In regard to your previous point on the DC-10, Senator Cannon, let me assure you that the DC-10 makes an appreciable difference in an impacted area, taking any particular noise level that you wish to in comparison.

But, if you use a hundred perceived decibels as a standard, it reduces the impacted acres to about 28 percent of what they were, say, with the Boeing 320-C. So, that is a tremendous step forward and I would certainly encourage any activity, Federal or otherwise, to get more of these aircraft in.

Certainly I agree with the mayor that it is not the ultimate answer, but it is the best answer that we are going to have within a meaningful time frame, in our lifetime. Now, we further said that by 1979, December 31, all aircraft using Los Angeles International must meet Federal Air Regulation 36.

The reason we adopted Federal Air Regulation 36 primarily is that we think, being in the real world, these are the kinds of airplanes that are going to be flying. We don't think that someone is going to waive a magic wand and produce something else by that period of time. It simply is not going to happen. So, if that is the real world, then that is the standard that we had better all work toward in trying to implement it, and do the best we can with it.

Beyond that we have created a noise enforcement division within the department of airports and I will be employing the officer to head that division next Wednesday at our regular board meeting, to set up people to watch over this program and to work with the carriers and I should say, I guess, at this point, that the cooperation of the airlines and the cooperation of the FAA in this program so far has been spirited and fully cooperative and I feel we are going to have a reasonable-reasonably successful program.

Lastly, and I think this is in answer to your point, Senator Canon, we do not think that this is the only answer. We think that the community has some responsibility in this. After all, they get some benefit from it and we think the communities should do all they can with land use programs.

The problem really is that it is just bigger in this whole area than what communities and local proprietors can deal with.

No matter how hard we try, we cannot deal with the scope of this problem. So, we think that certain things would be helpful to us and we would like to encourage you to use your various influences to try and help us accomplish it.

I would like to make one last point about the schools before I get into my recommendations. With regard to the schools, in 1953, long before anyone involved today was present, the airport commission petitioned the school agencies and planning agencies widely throughout the area pointing out that schools under the flight pattern were not compatible.

Copies of that resolution are available at the airport and despite that, and for example, I think this may be one of the schools that you had in mind, Senator, there was a junior high school built just east of the northern approaches in Los Angeles that the Los Angeles School Board has since closed down.

It was quite obvious that it should not have been there in the first place. They have taken the action, however.

Senator CANNON. When was it built?

Mr. MOORE. I think it was built in 1954, the start of the year, following the resolution of the airport commission, if my memory serves me correctly.

Now, I cannot comment too much on the rest of the problem for the schools because we are in litigation and I do not want to do any thing to foreclose on the position of our attorneys in this

matter.

But, I have an open mind about the subject from a manager's standpoint. I will just point out to you that the cost solution to this problem are astronomical also because of the $99 million claim that Ms. Russell mentioned, only relates to Los Angeles and there is virtually an identical plan for schools not in the city of Los Angeles.

So, the numbers in this game get very very high, and the people who ultimately are going to have to pay are the users of the airport. So, we think that you could be helpful to us as sort of the man in the middle, again, if you will, in doing certain things.

One, following the completion of the EPA report, which is being generated and the FAA's review of that report, if you would make a finding of what you believe the most prudent criteria and standards are with regard to noise impact and establish those as standards so that the average judge and jury, at least in this State, will not have to interpret for himself what the standards should be because in all of our cases this is exactly what takes place.

They listen to a welter of experts with fantastic presentations on many many days of time and they are, I am quite sure, numb and then have to figure out what is the right yardstick to use in determining the damages to be assessed.

We think this is a Federal institution, this national system and the very least we can anticipate are some guidelines that people can use to judge the situation.

Second, we think that there should be some Federal incentive programs since the Federal Government had a role in this to begin with in certificating the aircraft, to provide, let's say, the carrot and maybe the stick also to help local communities in working out their land use programs. Perhaps an adjustment to urban renewal, as was suggested by the National Industrial Pollution Control Council last year, and National Airport Terminals Corp.

And, also work with gradual financial incentives in the communities to help them work their way through the problem which would eventually be on a profitable basis, I am sure.

Third, we think that one of the most important aspects we have got, not in a major way, but is a step forward were the discussions that the carriers had with regard to the service reductions between Los Angeles and the eastern cities.

That resulted, if I remember, last year alone in 3,600 operations being removed from what were originally scheduled here simply because the carriers were able to work out load adjustment in terms of how many aircraft flew to Washington and New York and so forth. Now, I realize that the Justice Department has taken the position that this is an antitrust and I realize that the CAB is concerned over the competition.

But, you must recognize that this is a regulated industry anyway and if we could get some benefits to the carrier in higher load factors, and to the cities in reduction of the number of noisy operations that take place, then those are all plus factors for everyone.

Perhaps it will take some modification of the appropriate antitrust modifications to allow this kind of conversation to go on. So, we would certainly encourage that to the extent that the airlines feel it makes sense.

Now, we would like to encourage you to continue to produce quieter engines.

I have just returned from a trip to Britain as a guest of the British Government to look at some of their advances and was pleased to hear the engine people over there tell us that they have a third gen

eration on the books, which they are pretty sure will be more quiet than the DC-10, and the L-1011 engine. I am sure that that will be true of our own engine manufacturers.

But, there has got to be some research done and funds should be expended in this area and everything that can be done in this area is ultimately going to be fruitful. So, we would like to see you do that and then getting into this matter of retrofit, if it is real, that in the next decade the FAR part 36 is going to be the standard and criteria for aircraft, then to me it only makes sense that we either try to retire the noisy aircraft as quickly as we can, or that we try to retrofit, or refit, whatever the correct term is, the existing engines to the standard as closely as it is practical to do so.

It is my personal opinion that this cannot be done out of the current airline profit and fare structures. I just do not think that it is feasible.

In 1968 we proposed to Federal agencies and municipal governments and state governments around this country, a program at that time that there should be a dollar assessment for passengers escrowed for this purpose under the ADAP-it was not ADAP then, but it later became ADAP, under that umbrella: that these funds be given as direct grant to the airlines for the purposes of assisting them either in early retirement, or in refitting of the more noise engines.

Now, I know one can take the position that this is an airline responsibility and it should be taken from the profit structure, but let's be realistic about that.

The fact is, it all comes from the user and it would make much more sense to assess this directly against the user under rigid control than to have these funds disbursed so that they are not depreciable by the airlines, but rather considered a direct grant and not carried on their books.

The cost to the user will be far less than if the airlines have to go out and borrow money. I met with a chief executive of an airline recently that just one segment of his fleet was $107 million cash alone that he would have to borrow. Now, if they have to borrow that $7 million, the user is going to end up paying $300 million for it. It makes more sense to levy directly against the user and issue that money as a grant fund for the carriers because the user will pay less in the final analysis.

Those are basically the points we want to make. I want to assure you again, both of you, that we are aware of the problems. We are aware of the human needs and sensibilities involved here.

But, at the same time, we recognize that this problem solving has to be done in such a fashion that we do not cripple our city and community here, and, what we are really hoping is that we will not have to continue down this path alone much longer, but rather get some assistance.

Thank you very much.

Senator CANNON. Well, thank you, Mr. Moore, for a very fine

statement.

I have read your statement and, as I said, it will be made a part of the record in full. I have one or two comments on some of the suggestions you made.