Broadcast of Airport Board Sessions Asked

Burbank City Council members, unable to pressure the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority to meet at night instead of mornings, said they want to study the possibility of videotaping authority meetings and broadcasting them at night.

Councilwoman Mary Lou Howard, who sits on the nine-member airport board, said Tuesday that the broadcasts would give citizens who can’t go to the meetings an opportunity to see the board in action and become acquainted with airport issues.

“It would provide a service and let people know what’s going on,” Howard said.

But other commissioners did not seem to share Howard’s enthusiasm for the plan.

“If I had a choice between taping and not taping, I would choose not to tape,” said Robert Garcin, authority president.

‘Not Worthwhile’

“These meetings don’t need to be broadcast,” said Carl Meseck, who represents Glendale. “We can’t conduct good business that way. It’s not a worthwhile situation for anyone.”

Some opponents of videotaping said filming the meetings would encourage more interruptions by gadflies who regularly attend the meetings and berate board members at length.

“This would just be an extension of the same people who are literally at every single meeting saying the same thing,” said Carl W. Raggio, another Glendale representative. “These folks are far more interested in how they present themselves and how they bash us than in the content of what they’re saying.”

“This would just be an added opportunity for these folks to be on stage,” Meseck said.

Other commissioners said they would need more information about costs before making a decision. A few said they would not be interested if the cities they represent had to bear some of the costs.

The authority, which oversees the operation of Burbank Airport, meets at 9 a.m. on the first and third Mondays of each month.

Larry Johnson, the city of Burbank’s public information officer, said he was trying to discover how much taping the meetings would cost.

‘Thousands of Dollars’

Although he declined to speculate on a specific figure, Johnson said the taping would cost in “the thousands of dollars.”

He is scheduled to report to the council next week.

“The goal is to make the meetings watchable,” Johnson said. “Taping the meetings with one camera would not do it.”

He said it would cost more to film the meetings with three cameras.

Howard said the meetings could be broadcast over the Sammons Communications cable system, which serves Glendale and Burbank. The Burbank City Council and Planning Commission meetings are aired each week over the system.

But Sammons does not serve Pasadena, which owns one-third of the airport and whose three representatives form one-third of the airport board.

For the third time in four years, the airport authority last week rejected a Burbank City Council proposal to hold its regularly scheduled meetings at night for the convenience of the public.

Authority members opposed to the switch said they believe that night meetings would not be as productive with additional public input.