Valley Interview : Burbank Mayor Hopes Airport Cooperation Takes Flight

During the final weeks of his one-year term as Burbank’s mayor, Bill Wiggins has been caught in the middle of an increasingly vitriolic debate over expansion efforts at Burbank Airport.

Wiggins supports the first phase of expansion, which would boost the number of commercial flights nearly 10% and eventually allow the airport to accommodate 5.4 million passengers a year.

But when he and his colleagues on the Burbank City Council received last-minute word of a $109.8-million proposal to finance a new terminal, Wiggins was so upset at airport officials that he called a rare Sunday night meeting April 2 and instructed Burbank’s three airport commissioners to vote against the financial measure.

The vote on the financing proposal was eventually postponed until Monday.

But the April 2 session yielded a list of demands by city officials asking, for example, that the airport try to limit late-night commercial flights, as well as compensate the city for lost property taxes resulting from terminal expansion.

In an interview from his office in Glendale, Wiggins expressed dismay with the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority and discussed other issues facing Burbank, such as deteriorating city schools and criticism over the Burbank Redevelopment Agency’s dealings with private developers.

In one case, the redevelopment agency signed an agreement with developers of the Burbank Airport Hilton enabling the hotel partnership to keep up to $3 million in agency loans.

The agency also allowed mall developer Alexander Haagen to buy the city’s interest in the Media City Center mall for $10 million. The city had originally agreed to evenly split mall profits with Haagen for the life of the project.

Question: Are you happy with the way airport officials handled their most recent proposal to finance the terminal, giving such short notice to the council?

Answer: No, I’m not and I hope we can get things smoothed out. I am not happy with the way they handled it and I think that we have to separate the land purchase from the terminal construction project.

I see nothing wrong with buying the land from (the Lockheed Martin Corp.) It gets it out of the hands of Lockheed, but it also will start the cleanup process as well. I think that’s all good and well. But I think the city needs to reserve its right to have input in a major way on any new terminal construction project. And I think that’s the focus of the flurry of activity between our staff and the Airport Authority staff.

Q: Aren’t the two agencies supposed to be working together?

A: We’ve had a memorandum of cooperation that was signed in May of 1994, and there just hasn’t been a lot of cooperation. The airport says that they made some overtures to our staff, and our staff said that they were not really interested in meeting. I have a hard time believing that.

Q: Who do you believe is to blame in all of this?

A: I don’t know who’s to blame . . . but I certainly think that the airport was wrong in trying to ram a resolution--which really encompassed far more than just the land purchase--through the authority in very short notice.

Q: Many have wondered why council members Robert Bowne and George Battey Jr., who also serve on the Airport Authority, did not notify the council of the proposed vote on April 3. They have said they knew a financial measure was coming, but did not know what form it would take. Are you satisfied with this response? You had the opportunity to fire them and chose not to.

A: The airport commissioners, whether they’re Glendale or Burbank or Pasadena commissioners, may have known the resolution was coming, but I don’t believe our commissioners knew the exact form it was going to take until Friday (March 31). Yeah, I’m satisfied with the answer.

My style is not a confrontational style. I consider George and Bob to be team players, and I consider them to be willing to try and work things out. I think with three weeks left on their terms as both City Council people and Airport Authority commissioners, it would be pretty disastrous and pretty tumultuous for the city to remove them from their positions.

Q: How can you have confidence that the Airport Authority and Burbank City Council will be able to work out their differences, especially with two new members joining the council on May 1 who oppose airport expansion?

A: I think we’re going to be forced to work together. I think the Airport Authority is not going to go away, and I sure think the city of Burbank is not going to go away. I think the two entities are going to have to work with each other. And I think if the Airport Authority thinks that they are going to run independently of any one of the three cities, they really better think again.

Q: Another important issue in Burbank is the condition of the city’s public schools. School district officials say they need $30 million to repair and renovate schools across the city, but the city has only offered $23 million. Does the city have the extra $7 million available and, if not, what should the school district be doing instead?

A: In my mind, we have tried to give to all interests in the city--all the way from sidewalks and alleys to parks to police and fire--something to keep their facilities up. Sure there’s probably $7 million if we want to take it away from another project. But it’s my feeling we’ve been fair. I don’t think at this point in time we ought to be taking an additional $7 million from any other project that we’ve already allocated it to.

As far as what the school district does, I would hope in the very near future that they gear up for a bond campaign. I think a bond is going to be necessary, and they’re going to need a very long time to put on the proper campaign.

I suspect very shortly, after May 1, that one of the council members is going to ask that we put the subject of a 10% tax (on long-term parking at the Burbank Airport) back on the agenda, and I suspect it will pass very easily down the road. That has the potential to provide some substantial amount of money per year.

Q: You’ve had some redevelopment deals go sour, one with mall developer Alexander Haagen and the other with Hilton hotel developer Lew Wolff and his partners. Are you satisfied with how both deals have turned out and how redevelopment is working in Burbank?

A: As far as how both deals have turned out, you know that I was not on the council when both those deals were put together.

As far as the Haagen deal goes, when I look at what the upside was with the deal that was in place before we changed it, compared with the money we got in the buyout, I think we ended up with more than we would have if we left the deal the way it was. I’m satisfied with the action the council took that I was a part of.

We looked at the Hilton deal and decided that, at this point in time, we didn’t want to change it. I’m happy with that decision.

Q: Do you have any regrets over whether Burbank should have stayed in its partnership with Haagen?

A: No, I sure don’t. That goes beck to the decision the council made on the buyout. . . . When you look at the fact that we would not start getting any kind of returns for many, many, many, many years, and the best case scenario was in the area of $2.5 million, I’m happy with the decision we made.