Judge Orders Airport to Study Effects of Noise Caused by an Expansion : Burbank: The decision is called a victory by residents who say officials have ignored their concerns.

The city of Los Angeles won an important legal battle against Burbank Airport on Friday when a judge granted the city’s request that airport officials be compelled to study the possible noise and pollution impacts of a new, larger terminal.

The ruling by Superior Court Judge Robert H. O’Brien said that the airport must study the possible negative side effects of the proposed new terminal--even if the airport decides to take no action to minimize them.

“Common sense dictates that responsible authorities evaluate the environmental concerns to be directly caused by the project,” he said in a tentative decision released Friday.

The ruling is the latest episode in a long-running battle between the airport and the city over noise generated by the airport.

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 has 3,500 parking spaces.

The city’s lawsuit was filed in April amid angry complaints from airport neighbors, who fear that the new terminal will mean more flights and thus more noise.

Airport officials have vehemently defended the terminal plans, saying they are not required to study potential noise problems because any additional noise would come from flights added by market demand, not by construction of a new terminal. In effect, the administrators argued that aircraft may make noise, but airports are silent.

But O’Brien clearly disagreed, saying that even if the new terminal does not, in itself, create more noise, it does accommodate the added air traffic. Thus, he said, the negative impacts must be studied before the terminal is built.

“If increased air/noise impacts are going to occur at or near the airport, then that should be properly evaluated and considered in any environmental impact report for any project that is designed to accommodate the impacts,” he said.

Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, who made the motion in March to sue the airport, said the ruling was a clear victory for the city over airport officials, who he said have continually ignored the problems the airport creates for neighbors in Los Angeles.

“We were very confident of winning this because (the airport’s) arguments were preposterous,” said Yaroslavsky, whose district includes parts of Studio City and Sherman Oaks, which lie under the route usually taken by planes departing Burbank.

Keith Pritsker, the deputy city attorney who spearheaded the lawsuit, said the city is not trying to stop construction of the terminal, but simply to require the airport to study the problems it may create.

Pritsker said his office will now draft specific language that the judge can consider using in his final decision. He said he expects a final ruling to be released in two months.

Airport spokesman Victor Gill declined to comment on the ruling, saying the airport’s attorneys were evaluating the decision. He said the Airport Commission might discuss the ruling behind closed doors at a special meeting Monday.

A similar lawsuit by the Los Angeles Unified School District was settled in September when airport officials agreed to pay $2.5 million to soundproof and install air conditioning at Glenwood School in Sun Valley at the northern end of the airport’s north-south runway.