Business leaders remaining cool to Hahn Airport plan. (Politics).

MOST local business leaders so far have refused to support L.A. Mayor James Hahn's proposal to massively overhaul Los Angeles International Airport.

Nearly three months after the $9 billion-plus plan was introduced, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, the Central City Association, the Valley Industry and Commerce Association and the Economic Development Corp. of L.A. County have all declined to take a position. Privately, they are skeptical about the overhaul, which would not increase terminal capacity, and fear that the airport would become more inconvenient for travelers.

Hahn's plan calls for a remote check-in facility nearly two miles from the terminals, moving runways and installing an underground baggage mover.

"This thing is scary," said one local business group leader. "Our entertainment company members are telling me they don't think they're going to want to fly out of LAX once it's reconfigured. It's just going to be too much of a hassle."

When Hahn announced the plan on July 2, several LAX-area hotel operators and other local merchants stood with the mayor. But since then, the only citywide group to endorse the plan is the Los Angeles Business Advisors, a group of some two dozen executives.

LABA president Sam Bell said his board voted to support the plan because the airport needs to be modernized and security upgraded "sooner rather than later. It's not a perfect plan and we do have some concerns--like the cost and the transfer of luggage from the remote check-in site to the airport--but it meets enough of our criteria that we're supportive of it."

But that's the exception. Meanwhile, intense opposition is expected from the airlines and others wary of spending so many billions to "rearrange the deck chairs" as one critic put it.

In August, several airlines operating out of LAX sent a letter to Hahn, calling many of the plan's components "questionable."

"The plan takes an existing great airport -- it's convenient, it's compact and it functions in a relatively harmonious way--and destroys it," Dim Garcia, former Airport Commission president, said in an interview with the Metro Investment Report.

Airport Commission President Ted Stein, one of the architects of the Hahn plan, said he remains confident that as more details are put forward, the business community will support it.