Around the state

SAN FRANCISCO — A state appeals court has ordered the city to pay about $1 million in legal fees to a white man who won a race-discrimination suit he filed after not getting a promotion at San Francisco International Airport.

Allen Harmon won his case in San Mateo County in 2004. A jury awarded him $30,300 in damages, concluding he was rejected for a supervisor’s position in 1998 at least partially because of his race.

Harmon’s lawyers say a minority candidate received the promotion instead because the city had quotas on race, and that Harmon had to wait 16 months for another promotion. The city denied that it used racial bias in its hiring process and said a vast majority of promotions went to white men. They changed the policy Harmon challenged after the suit.

Despite long lines, flights moving along well at LAX

LOS ANGELES — Passengers at Los Angeles International Airport are fortunate compared to their counterparts in the East, where bad weather is causing ground delays of several hours in cities such as New York and Chicago.

At LAX on Sunday — just two days before Christmas — the longest waits were for passengers waiting to get into terminals so they could get to planes that actually were departing on schedule.

Passengers holding boarding passes for America West and Southwest airlines flights out of Terminal 1 were lengthy and slow moving all afternoon. Although most of those flights go to California, Nevada and Arizona destinations and were on time, the ticket and security lines were long.

Pamela Haskins, on a layover while traveling home to San Francisco from the Bahamas, said airport officials at LAX need to do "a lot better.”