Professor Bill Slomanson is quoted in this article:
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Local firm stakes claim to 40,000 square miles of ocean
By: DAVE DOWNEY - Staff Writer
ENCINITAS -- The guy who wants to build an airport out in the ocean isn't giving up.
After failing to persuade San Diego County airport officials to endorse his project a couple of years ago, North County entrepreneur Adam Englund has come up with another way to pursue his dream of building a floating airport. Now he is asserting that he and his firm, OceanWorks Development, have the exclusive right to build such a hub in 40,000 square miles off the Southern California coast.
In a notice sent to more than a dozen federal agencies -- among them the Federal Aviation Administration, Department of the Interior and Army Corps of Engineers -- he has asserted the right to the water from three to 200 miles out, and from Santa Barbara to the U.S.-Mexico border.
But already the claim is drawing snickers.
"I wouldn't take money to Vegas on this one for a long, long time," said Steve Erie, a political science professor at UC San Diego who closely followed San Diego County's airport site search during the past several years.
Englund, the firm's chief executive officer, said he decided to shoot for an expanded territory in the event an airport agency in the Los Angeles area or farther north opts one day to explore the concept.
"I think somewhere along this coast there will be someone with a vision," he said.
Airport observers, former airport board members and attorneys suggested the claim is more like a delusion than a vision.
"This is wishful thinking at its best," Erie said. "We have a history in San Diego of grandiose schemes and zero execution."
Former San Diego County Regional Airport Authority board member Bill Lynch of Rancho Santa Fe suggested nothing will come of it.
"He'd have about as much luck if he claimed the moon," Lynch said. "While he's at it, he might want to consider claiming Mars and Uranus as well."
Englund said he knew there would be giggles.
"I'm not worried about it at all," he said, chalking up the skepticism to the same kind of thinking that once insisted the world was flat and people would never walk on the moon.
Insisting he is serious about the project, Englund said that he sent copies of the claim to each member of California's congressional delegation, lawmakers along the Southern California coast and several counties.
Englund acknowledged the claim is unprecedented and that there is "no legal regime for licensing, acquiring and purchasing" ocean property for offshore airports. But he suggested his firm's approach is similar to that employed by miners in earlier centuries, when claims were staked to frontier lands for the purpose of one day extracting minerals.
"If nobody challenges -- and they are on notice -- over a period of time that claim becomes your own," he said.
If someone challenges the claim, the matter could wind up in court and trigger a legal judgment that formally establishes a right, he said.
"We're putting people on notice that, if they are interested in this project, they must come to us," Englund said. "For our investors, we want to shut out the competition from this area."
What it looks like, said professor Bill Slomanson, who teaches international law at Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, is the firm is hoping for some type of court decision.
"They want a lawsuit. There's no doubt about it," Slomanson said.
In spraying claim notices to a wide range of federal and regional officials and agencies, he said the group seems to be taking the right steps. Slomanson said there is a chance the effort could be successful.
Paul Peterson, a retired land-use attorney in San Diego and former airport board member, said he doesn't think so.
"I have never heard of any precedent for this ... for people staking a claim to what amounts to the land under the ocean," Peterson said. "It sounds pretty improbable to me."
Kurt Bardella, a spokesman for Rep. Brian Bilbray, R-Solana Beach, said in a telephone call from Washington that the congressman's office received the claim Wednesday.
"I don't know if the public is going to be able to wrap their arms around that kind of a concept," Bardella said. "Something like this might be viable 40 years from now. I don't know that it is now."
-- Contact staff writer Dave Downey at (760) 740-5442 or ddowney@nctimes.com.