Love's Labor Lost

And here comes Councilman Loza, right over to see me. I'm very flattered that he would rush away from the host committee like this just to talk to little old me, although I must say he looks a little flabbergasted. I do wonder what could be wrong.

"It's not often that we get reporters at an event like this," he says.

"Well, I just wanted to see who was here, what's what. It's a very impressive setting."

"Well, it's nice," he says. "It's a little hard to get to, by its very definition."

Yup. Real hard to get to. I hope I didn't lose that tailpipe on my Blazer, or somebody's gonna pay. We smile at each other for a while.

Then he says, "Is this, like, on the record?"

"Well, yeah."

I tell him that a number of people, both in the neighborhood groups and on the council, were quite surprised when, after defending the Love Field neighborhoods for so long, he tried to persuade the council to open up the East Concourse for American. And I do wonder if this little fund-raising soiree, tucked away in the deepest recesses of the arena property on a dark and stormy night, may serve as part of the explanation.

He tells me that he thinks he has been doing a good job for the neighborhoods. In a conversation on the telephone some weeks later, he tells me in more detail that he believes he can serve the neighborhoods well and give American Airlines a little help too.

"I really don't think it is a problem to the extent that people in the neighborhoods know the work I am doing for them. I'm certainly not going to apologize for the fact that I have one of the leading CEOs of our city backing me."

Um, OK.

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What you wind up with, then, at Love Field is a bunch of airlines sitting around with competitive guns pointed at one another's heads, most of them wishing they could be somewhere else, one of them already half dead and none of them with a clear, discernible business interest in big growth. You have a huge swath of the city where residential neighborhoods would be destroyed by blowout growth at Love Field.

But you also have people on the council and people on the city staff who either don't get it or can't be trusted to remember, often for the most ignominious reasons. I don't think for a minute that John Loza let Don Carty throw him a clandestine fund-raiser in the middle of the master plan process because he thought he was going to get anything out of it personally, beyond the usual campaign contributions. I think he just didn't have the guts to tell Carty to stuff it.

And, of course, American doesn't care. They hate Love Field. If it turns out in the weeks ahead that they have succeeded in killing Legend, then watch out, because the next thing they'd probably like to do is burn Love Field the way Sherman burned Atlanta.

Meanwhile, the task of dealing with the new legal atmosphere and also limiting growth is like disarming a bomb. All the city has to do is screw this thing up in one significant detail, and then Washington really will make them open up Love Field.

And here's the truly scary thing: John Loza really is the Love Field neighborhoods' protector. I would almost warn the people in those neighborhoods not to sleep with both eyes shut, but I don't think they've been able to do that for years anyway.