Airport officials weigh reducing lights

Hollywood Burbank Airport officials are looking into how they can reduce the amount of light emitted from the airfield’s transportation center.

A study will be conducted at the center to determine what can be done about the facility’s bright lights at night, said Denis Carvill, deputy executive director of engineering, maintenance, operations and airline relations, during a meeting of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority’s operations and development committee on Monday.

Several Burbank residents and some City Council members have said that the lighting is too excessive and that something needs to be done.

In March, the authority adopted a new lighting schedule at the center, with about 50% of the building’s lights on at different times of the day.

Some lighting fixtures are set to turn on at 5 a.m. and shut down at 8 a.m., and then come back on at 5 p.m. and be turned off again at 11 p.m.

However, despite the effort to reduce lighting at the facility at night, several residents still complained about the brightness of the lights.

Carvill said that the authority will be working with city staff and an electrical contractor to come up with a solution to make the transportation center less of an illuminated eyesore.

“We’ll come back to the committee once that has been done and let you know what’s been recommended and what the cost to implement those recommendations are,” he said.

Burbank Commissioner Don Brown asked authority staff if the transportation center has to be so wide open.

Dan Feger, the airport’s executive director, said that fire marshals told them that because the facility has so many fueling stations, the building needs a lot of ventilation to dissipate fuel vapors.

Additionally, Feger said that the authority had plans to decorate the building to cover more of the gaps. However, there was no room in the budget to do so.

“Because the ventilation was a desired thing and because we didn’t have enough money to decorate the exterior of the facility, we looked at the art panels as being the architectural feature that would distinguish the building,” he said. “Unfortunately, the art panels are not yet done.”

Later that morning during the authority’s board meeting, members unanimously voted to continue moving forward with the art-panels project, in which six large panels will be placed outside the transportation center along Hollywood Way.

The authority voted to increase the project’s budget to $325,000 and specified which types of materials should be used to preserve the artwork.

Gail Goldman, an art consultant paid by the authority, said the panels should be sent to the Gopher Sign Co., a sign manufacturer in South Dakota. Goldman said that Gopher Sign’s Duralite with ImageLOC printing process is supposed to protect the panels from cracking and fading for up to 10 years.

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Anthony Clark Carpio, anthonyclark.carpio@latimes.com

Twitter: @acocarpio