GLENDALE / BURBANK : Commissioner Returns Travel Reimbursement : Airport: William Paparian gives back $3,695 he’d received for wife’s trips. He also drops a defamation claim.

Pasadena Mayor William Paparian has repaid $3,695 to the Burbank Airport Authority that he had claimed and collected as reimbursement for travel expenses of his wife.

Paparian’s actions follow disclosures of free spending by the authority, of which Paparian is a member, such as extensive first-class travel and routine billing to taxpayers for spousal travel and expenses.

Paparian, an airport commissioner, also dropped a $100,000 claim for defamation against Burbank Councilman Ted McConkey, whose complaints about free spending by Airport Authority members led to a county investigation of airport spending practices.

“My wife and I thought this was appropriate,” said Paparian. “We don’t want to be involved in anything that has an appearance of not being appropriate.”

Paparian said he wanted to put the issue of travel expenses behind him so airport issues, like the construction of a new terminal and a mandatory curfew, could be at the forefront of authority business.

“We have been at a standstill,” Paparian said. “By dropping the claim, and now that the policy [of reimbursement of spouses’ travel expenses] is not followed anymore, it enables me to remove that impediment, if it was one, with Burbank.”

In June, Paparian filed a claim with the Burbank city clerk alleging that McConkey defamed him in a Pasadena newspaper story about the grand jury investigation.

“It is time to move on,” said Councilman Ted McConkey, who met with Paparian last week to discuss the matter. “But I hope that other commissioners follow his example and repay the money.”

Airport commissioners were reimbursed for expenses with airport funds, according to records given to the Los Angeles County grand jury that show a total of $130,000 paid to commissioners for business-related travel between 1992 and 1995.

The matter is now under investigation by a grand jury.

Efrem Grail, the deputy district attorney investigating the airport, said Paparian’s action will not affect the investigation.

“It is a political matter and we will not let a political matter influence a criminal investigation,” Grail said. “But under the law, restitution should have no effect on whether criminal charges are brought.”

Grail said the investigation should conclude soon.

In addition to reimbursing commissioners for their spouses’ travel expenses in the past, airport funds were also used to pay first-class travel, hotel rooms, tours of a dormant volcano in Hawaii, an ocean cruise and limousine rides.

After The Times disclosed commissioners’ travel expenses, authority President Carl W. Raggio Jr. pledged to end first-class air travel by commissioners and to discontinue the practice of paying for travel for their spouses.

Of the 57 expense reports submitted by commissioners and presented to the grand jury in June, 22 were for first-class travel and 13 included spouses.

The authority’s travel policies have been more liberal than those at airports operated by the Los Angeles Department of Airports--LAX, Van Nuys, Palmdale and Ontario--where officials typically fly coach and cannot bring along spouses without paying for the seats themselves.