Airport Growth Issues Won’t Go Away : Authority must negotiate with Burbank City Council to resolve matters of safety and noise

Any celebration of last week’s decision to table land-purchase plans for a new Burbank Airport terminal would be sadly misplaced. The action, taken by the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority in the face of opposition from Burbank, produced a standoff. Neither side has what it wants.

The Airport Authority had little choice, since legally any of the three cities that own the airport can keep it from borrowing money and the Burbank City Council had told its representatives to vote no. What must come now are serious negotiations over the airport’s future.

Resolving the conflict over the airport’s future will be difficult, since Burbank’s council as of May 1 will be dominated by opponents of airport expansion. Yet it must happen, and both sides have strong reasons to negotiate. Also, the city’s concerns about noise haven’t been addressed.

The airport, for example, wants to add five more gates; critics want none, associating more gates with more flights and noise.

But a gate shortage will just push flights to less busy times of day. The old, crowded building has not frightened off new customers so far, nor will it in the foreseeable future.

Officials expect that in the next three years, daily takeoffs could increase from the present 90 a day to just over 100. This will happen not because the airport wants it to happen but because flyers find Burbank more convenient than LAX and airlines add flights to meet demand. Incidentally, expansion will hardly produce the “mini-LAX” that some critics profess to fear.

The outright death of plans for a new terminal could lead to a true disaster. The existing one is too close to runways. Federal officials are pressing for relocation. If rebuffed, they could impose rules so restrictive that commercial jets could no longer use the airport. That would be an irresponsible, if not absurd, goal given the facility’s vast, beneficial impact on the local economy.

Burbank’s objections have not solved the airport’s impending growth problems. They have merely complicated the matter.