It's impossible to live more directly under the Los Angeles International Airport flight path than Mary Lucas. Jets roar low over her South Los Angeles home at all hours, thundering by like flocks of great metal geese.

"The planes drive us crazy," said Lucas, who has owned her three-bedroom house on Saint Andrews Place for 42 years. "You can't talk on the phone."

"And you never get used to it," Lucas' neighbor, James Harris, 41, said of the loudest nighttime takeoffs and arrivals, which shake even veteran residents from their sleep.

Harris' home on 84th Place between Van Ness and Western avenues qualifies for federal soundproofing money. More than a decade ago, his mother got double-paned windows, solid core exterior doors and central heat and air conditioning installed at no cost.

But the line on the map that federal officials use to determine who lives in noise-impacted areas cuts a few yards west of Lucas' 1940s-era bungalow. She does not qualify for soundproofing money and has not had her home retrofitted.

"How can they say I don't have noise but across the street they do?" Lucas said. "I don't understand that."

Inequities such as this would end under a landmark $500 million Community Benefits Agreement that the Los Angeles City Council is scheduled to vote on today. The pact, which Harris helped negotiate with LAX directors, would extend soundproofing benefits to all residents on a block where one home qualifies for them, and provide job training and environmental programs to communities and schools around LAX in Inglewood, Lennox and South Los Angeles.

The Board of Airport Commissioners last week approved the pact, which was negotiated over nine months by representatives from LAX and a group called the Coalition for Environmental, Economic and Educational Justice. The idea was to compensate communities most affected by LAX operations and that would bear the brunt of the airport modernization plan that the City Council approved last week. In turn, these communities would not sue to block the modernization.

Provisions of the agreement must be approved by the Federal Aviation Administration.

But the agreement is not without controversy. Officials from Inglewood, which sits due east of the airport, claim it doesn't offer their city enough. Mayor Roosevelt Dorn told the Los Angeles City Council last week that Inglewood deserves more than $200 million, including $180 million to soundproof homes and $33 million to repair Century Boulevard.

LAX is negotiating an amendment of a benefits agreement that Inglewood and the airport signed in February 2001. Inglewood City Administrator Mark Weinberg, through a secretary, said he could not comment on the negotiations other than to say he hopes they're done by the end of the month.

Perhaps nobody would reap more from the pending Community Benefits Agreement than the staff and students in the Lennox and Inglewood school districts.

Under the agreement, the airport would pay to install double-or triple-paned windows in Lennox school buildings where windows were blocked over in the early 1980s to keep noise out, depriving students of the natural light that has been shown to improve learning, said Superintendent Bruce McDaniel. Additionally, well-insulated permanent classrooms would be constructed to replace thin-walled, windowless portables, and LAX would pay to build gymnasiums at all five of the district's elementary schools, he said.

"Every minute you get interrupted from teaching that (gym) class outside," McDaniel said.

Lucas, the South Los Angeles resident, wants a little peace and quiet of her own. Standing in the cozy living room of the home she shares with her son, daughter-in-law and two grandchildren, she said she plans to apply for soundproofing money as soon as it's available.

"You make sure they get to me first," she said.