Airport to Pay for Upgrades to School

Burbank Airport officials have agreed to pay the Los Angeles Unified School District $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit by the district that charged that plans for a new, larger terminal failed to study the noise impact on nearby schools, officials announced Friday.

Under the settlement agreement signed Thursday, Burbank Airport will pay $500,000 and seek $2 million in federal grants to sound-proof and install air conditioning at Glenwood School, an elementary school in Sun Valley at the end of the airport’s north-south runway.

In return, the school district agreed to drop its lawsuit, officials said.

“Basically, we got what we needed at the lowest cost to the district,” said Peter James, an attorney hired by the district to pursue the lawsuit. “We couldn’t be happier.”

Airport spokesman Victor Gill said airport officials are also happy to see the suit settled. But he added that the airport had always planned to provide funds to soundproof adjacent schools plagued by noise problems.

“We are just moving ahead on the path we said we were on,” Gill said.

This year, the airport received a final federal grant to complete a nearly $4-million project to soundproof Luther Burbank Middle School, beneath the heavily used southern takeoff route of the airport’s north-south runway.

The district’s lawsuit, filed in July, charged that additional traffic from the new terminal will create noise for several schools in Sun Valley and North Hollywood. But James said Glenwood School was chosen for the improvements because it is most affected by aircraft noise.

The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority, which oversees airport operations, voted March 22 to build a 670,000-square-foot terminal with 12,300 parking spaces. The current 163,344-square-foot building 3,500 parking spaces.

But the plans for a new terminal generated criticism from neighbors who argued that the larger terminal would mean more flights and more noise. Furthermore, the environmental study of the new terminal, they said, should include ways to curb the noise created by the additional takeoffs.

Burbank Airport officials have defended the terminal plans. They said that they are not required to review potential noise problems because any additional noise would come from flights added by market demands, not by the construction of a new terminal.

They also have said that the airport would add more flights to meet that demand regardless of whether a new terminal is built.

The settlement with the school district Thursday does not affect the separate lawsuit filed by the city of Los Angeles. A hearing on that suit is scheduled for Oct. 29 in Los Angeles Superior Court.

Keith Pritsker, a Los Angeles deputy city attorney, said lawyers for the city and the airport met in May to try to settle the lawsuit but failed to make any progress.

Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said the city will not settle for money alone. He said the suit will force the airport to study ways to spread the increased noise fairly over the region. Yaroslavsky said residents in Studio City, North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks and Van Nuys suffer the brunt of the noise.

“We are in it for the long haul, even if the school district isn’t,” he said.