Airport Noise Suit Shield Wins Passage

For the third time in three years, legislators Friday sent Gov. George Deukmejian a bill to protect California airports from repeated lawsuits over jet noise, a measure that Burbank Airport officials have called crucial to the airport’s survival.

A bipartisan 49-21 majority of the Assembly gave final approval to a measure that would keep neighboring residents from suing airports more than once unless operations or noise levels “significantly change.”

The bill would overturn a 1985 ruling by the state Supreme Court that said airport operations represent “the quintessential continuing nuisance,” thus allowing irritated neighbors to file repeated lawsuits.

‘Permanent Nuisance’

The bill would declare that, beginning in December, 1987, jet noise would be classed as a “permanent nuisance.”

Burbank Airport officials were among the leaders of a campaign for such a law by airport owners throughout the state.

The president of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority, Robert Garcin, warned in February that the issue was one of two major problems that “may close this airport.” The other problem was the insistence by the Federal Aviation Administration on expensive alterations to the airport’s operations for safety reasons.

Unless the Legislature protected it from multiple lawsuits, Garcin predicted, “The airport will probably go broke and terminate its activities and sell the land for an industrial park.”

Similar bills were vetoed by Deukmejian in 1983 and 1984. A spokeswoman for the governor predicted he will look unfavorably on this measure as well.

Tells Sympathy

When Deukmejian vetoed the first such bill in 1983, he said he was sympathetic to problems publicly owned airports face but felt the solution should not “drastically limit the public’s access to the courts.”

“Under no circumstances does it bar a claim,” Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) said of the new law. “But it would bar you from . . . being able to go in and harass the airport . . . every time a PSA plane lands or a United takes off.”