Jeers Punctuate Public Meeting on Airport

A public meeting on Burbank Airport noise attended by six Los Angeles City Council members Wednesday night was repeatedly interrupted by booing and jeers from angry residents of neighborhoods under the airport’s flight paths.

About 300 persons crowded into the auditorium at Colfax Elementary School to attend the meeting, arranged by homeowner groups that have long been critical of noise from the airport.

As T. E. Greer, the airport’s manager, attempted to make a presentation, a man in the audience stood and shouted: “We’ve had enough of this. We’re not here to listen to you. You’re here to listen to us and our problems.”

The crowd jeered when Vacar said a new terminal would be able to accommodate 7.3 million passengers a year by the year 2000, more than double the 3 million handled last year, and that daily departures would increase from 85 to 125.

When Councilman John Ferraro opened the meeting by saying, “We don’t understand what you’re thinking unless you let us know,” members of the audience jeered that they had been trying to tell the council for years about their unhappiness with airport noise.

Other council members attending the meeting were Ernani Bernardi, Marvin Braude, Joel Wachs, Michael Woo and Zev Yaroslavsky.

Many in the crowd said they wanted a limit placed on the number of flights at the airport and favored “share the noise” proposals. The proposals call for reducing the number of southbound takeoffs, which circle over the eastern San Fernando Valley, by increasing the number of eastbound takeoffs, which would send more planes over the three cities that own the airport--Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena. Currently, 90% of flights take off to the south.

Wachs, saying he is the only council member who lives under the airport flight path, charged that the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority failed to keep commitments to use the east-west runway more frequently.

Robert Garcin, president of the authority, countered that the authority had never made such a commitment and that the authority was restricted by Federal Aviation Administration rules, which now forbid any eastbound takeoffs.