Burbank Hopes Deal Will Be Icing on Cake

“Hello, you’ve reached the city of Burbank, home of Disney and Capital Cities/ABC.”

That’s how some Burbank city officials gleefully answered their phones Monday after the Walt Disney Co. announced its planned $19-billion merger with Capital Cities/ABC Inc.

Burbank’s dowdy image has long been the butt of jokes on NBC-TV’s “Tonight Show,” but city officials hope that Disney’s proposed absorption of the top-rated ABC television network will help draw more attention to Burbank as a capital of the entertainment industry.

Walt Disney Co. is already based in Burbank, but now the city will enjoy the prestige of becoming the first West Coast city with a parent company for one of the Big Three television networks.

Officials at Walt Disney Co., which employs about 7,000 at its facilities in the Burbank-Glendale area, said that relocating Capital Cities workers here isn’t part of the company’s plan.

Under the terms of the deal, Capital Cities/ABC will operate as a wholly owned Disney subsidiary that will continue to be based at its Manhattan headquarters.

But economists said that when one giant corporation swallows another, economic spillover is inevitable.

“Over the near term, it’s going to be more symbolic than dollars and cents,” said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles County. “You aren’t going to see a line of trucks with ABC on the side coming into town. But this is now a much larger corporation, and all its needs from accounting to legal to public relations get much bigger.”

The Disney-ABC deal also bolsters an already distinguished roster of city residents that includes Warner Bros. and NBC Studios, said Robert Tague, Burbank’s community development director. “These are prestigious corporations that are world-renowned,” he said. “We ride along on those images. This adds another.”

If Disney needs additional office space, it will be hard-pressed to find it in Burbank, where office and sound-stage space for entertainment companies is “tight as a drum,” said John Cushman, president of Cushman Realty Corp. in Los Angeles.

The office vacancy rate in Burbank’s Media District is just 2%, said Cushman, though several years ago Disney obtained permission from the city to triple the size of its facilities to about 3 million square feet. “If somebody wants to consolidate or make a move, they’re going to have to build,” Cushman said.

Since the late 1980s, Burbank has aggressively recruited entertainment and media companies for the city’s Media District, a 340-acre commercial zone that straddles the Ventura Freeway in the southwest corner of the city.

Anchored by Disney, Warner Bros. and NBC-TV’s West Coast operations, the Media District is home to more than half of the 90,000 jobs within the city’s boundaries, said Tague, who has spearheaded efforts to keep that figure rising.

Over the past four years, Burbank has doled out hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentive packages to companies that move into the district.

These efforts helped the city land companies ranging from the KIIS-FM radio station to a small studio equipment rental firm. Burbank officials also say they’re still in the hunt for DreamWorks SKG, the highly touted movie studio launched last year by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Throughout its Media District campaigns, the city has made the most of its relationship with its hometown heavyweights. Michael Eisner, chief executive of Disney, even appears in a promotional video produced for the city.

Monday’s announcement gives Burbank another corporate name to drop. “This really solidifies Burbank’s place on the entertainment map,” said economist Kyser. “Beautiful downtown Burbank is a name to be reckoned with in corporate America.”

Maybe, but the idea of Burbank as the media capital of the world was not exactly resounding through the hot, smog-filled streets of the city on Monday.

Waiting in line for tickets to “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” at NBC studios, 16-year-old Tomasina Delaney of Brooklyn surveyed the traffic whizzing by and remarked that the place seemed pretty quiet. “It’s nothing like New York City,” she said. “There’s not the shops, the people . . . no pay phones on the corners. It’s kind of scary.”

Another “Tonight Show” visitor, Henry Charrabe, 19, of Berlin, watches Leno in Germany and knows all about Disney. But “if you asked people in Europe where Burbank is, they wouldn’t know.” Leno doesn’t even really make jokes about it anymore the way his predecessor, Johnny Carson, once did, the fans agreed.

Disney’s muscular new animation building on Alameda Avenue is one of the few unusual designs along the imposing glass canyon that is Burbank’s thriving Media District.

Glen Conly, asset manager at the commercial leasing firm M. David Paul & Associates, thinks the expansion of big companies such as Disney has been great for the city. “This is really a hot area,” said Conly, lunching at a hamburger restaurant down the street from the Disney studios.

But Chuck Trudeau said he is disgusted with the growth of Burbank’s Media District. “Look: Glendale got the Galleria, Burbank got the Price Club. That’s the mentality,” he said.

Pointing toward the Disney building down the street from his parents-in-law’s house, Trudeau said Disney does little for Burbank. “How many people who work there live here?” he asked. “None. They come from over the hill in West Hollywood.”