BURBANK : Council Approves Project List for Year

The Burbank City Council is setting its sights on two highway interchanges, more trees on the streets and development that doesn’t flood schools with new students.

The mostly freshman City Council spent two months poring over the city’s to-do list for the 1993-94 fiscal year, finally approving a plan Tuesday night.

The council typically sets its goals for the coming year before the end of the fiscal year in June, but with three new members--Dave Golonski, Susan Spanos and Vice Mayor Bill Wiggins--they needed an education on the issues first.

The first priority will be to obtain funding for an interchange linking the Golden State and Ventura freeways so that traffic can be routed off residential streets. Building an off-ramp at Empire Avenue to help develop the former Lockheed property was also on the list.

Council members will consider overhauling zoning restrictions if they and the school board can find a way to encourage development without contributing to crowding in the schools, officials said.

The council set a goal to plant 1,000 trees, half of which would be funded by $40,000 in city funds and the rest to be paid through donations.

A “mansionization” zoning program, which would set stricter height limits on single-family homes, had not originally been included in the list of goals, but was added by the council. Mansionization, in which homes are rebuilt and enlarged to the maximum legal size, occurred throughout Burbank in the mid- to late 1980s, although the trend has slowed recently, said Scott Mitnick, assistant to the city manager.

Other items in the 1993-94 plan include:

* Helping the Alexander Haagen Co. bring the occupancy rate at the Media City Center shopping mall from 70% to 90%, city officials said.

* Making sure that Specialty Restaurants rebuilds the Castaway Restaurant damaged by fire recently. The city owns the property, and terms of the lease require rebuilding the restaurant. The city has yet to work out details of the renovation with the restaurant.

* Continuing to push for a Burbank/Glendale light-rail line.

* Finding a way to raise the number of sworn police officers from 1.54 per 1,000 residents to 1.6.