Burbank Fires Gee From Airport Panel

Amid an uproar from Burbank Airport opponents, the Burbank City Council has voted to fire 62-year-old homemaker Margie Gee, one of the city’s most hard-line representatives on the airport commission.

The 3-2 vote taken after two hours of sometimes-raucous public testimony seems yet another sign that local leaders are bent on taking a softer approach to the dispute over the airport’s planned expansion, despite mounting public pressure to the contrary.

“Margie is so wrapped up in this thing it’s become a personal war,” explained City Councilman Dave Golonski, who made the motion for her removal.

Added Councilman Bill Wiggins, who also voted for her ouster: “She’s a lot more combative than I would be.”

Gee, a grandmother and longtime anti-noise crusader, is the second airport commissioner to be fired since Burbank and the Airport Authority reconvened formal talks on the airport expansion in June. Earlier, the Glendale City Council voted to remove its most controversial commissioner: Robert Garcin.

Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena each appoint three representatives to the commission that oversees the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority.

For the past several years, the commission has been wracked by infighting as Burbank--the city most affected by airport noise--has opposed a plan for a new, bigger terminal supported by the other two cities.

Gee and Garcin represented opposite poles on the commission, with Gee fighting tirelessly for airport traffic controls that Garcin opposed.

Her style during her two years on the commission has been called diligent by some, aggravating by others.

By her own account, she was relentlessly concerned with procedural issues, halting meetings to raise questions over seemingly routine matters such as approval of the minutes from the previous meeting.

“I had a choice to sit by for the next lawless act or protest it. I protested it,” she said. But others on the commission call her efforts quibbling, and accuse her of trying to micro-manage the authority.

The firings of Garcin and Gee have prompted airport opponents to speculate that a secret quid-pro-quo deal was struck in recent airport negotiations.

“The clear indication is that Margie is being dumped as part of a mediation payoff,” said City Councilman Ted McConkey, who voted against Gee’s removal.

But negotiators on both sides dismiss the idea.

Rather, “We have to find a way to get beyond the current situation of having people not communicating and not even attempting to communicate,” said Golonski, a computer systems director for Health Net.

And Garcin, for his part, took exception to the suggestion that Gee’s firing might counterbalance his own. “Speculation of a trade is ludicrous,” he said, adding that Gee, though “a very nice lady,” was also “an irritant” who was never qualified for the job.

Gee, though, enjoyed the passionate support of a small group of homeowners who have been battling the airport’s expansion for years and who distrust Burbank’s recent efforts to find a settlement.

They tend to see the Airport Authority as a secretive, powerful entity immune to public pressure, and they often cast the airport dispute in class terms, as a battle between moneyed airline interests and working-class homeowners.

Gee is one of their own. She and her husband, a retired electrical technician, raised their five children in the home they share under the flight path of the airport.

She began fighting the airport in 1968 after a commercial jet flying low over her home shook the timbers and made her children cry, she said.

Gee’s supporters picketed in front of City Hall and packed Tuesday’s council meeting to try to persuade members to keep her.

“I’m disgusted, I’m angry, I’m whatever,” said one speaker, James Arone, a Burbank homeowner who had to step back from the podium and take a deep breath during his testimony because he was so worked up, he said.

Several other speakers compared the airport dispute to the Boston Tea Party. And one woman went so far as to suggest that Mayor Bob Kramer--a paint contractor who initiated the latest round of airport talks--was in league with the devil. Did he wear “the mark of the beast?” she asked.

Despite these efforts, Golonski, Wiggins and City Councilwoman Stacey Murphy voted to fire Gee; McConkey and Kramer voted against.

It is the second time Gee has been dumped from the airport commission. She was fired in 1985 by a previous council, which found her approach too extreme.

“I have been working with this issue for 30 years, and I have never seen the authority give a millimeter. All I’ve seen them do is tighten the screws,” she said.

Gee is among those noise activists opposed to the current airport talks started by Kramer, who is worried about mounting legal bills stemming from numerous airport-related lawsuits. Kramer says he wants to give negotiations another month to see if the dispute might be resolved more cheaply.

But the decision, called politically risky for a mayor who ran for office on a campaign opposing the airport, has sparked anger and division among noise activists. Fear of the talks was an oft-repeated theme at Tuesday’s council meeting.

Not all airport opponents agree. Charlie Lombardo, a longtime activist, said Burbank would be remiss not to try to forge a settlement. “I mean, the Cold War ended quicker than this,” he said.

In the long run, controversial as it was, the decision to drop Gee may do little to settle finer points of the debate, such as whether the airport should be allowed to expand to 16 gates as Burbank prefers, or 19 with the potential to add eight more, as is currently planned.

But as a conciliatory gesture, it’s convincing to some.

“Burbank is making a sincere effort to tone down the rhetoric,” said Pasadena Mayor Chris Holden, who is on the airport commission. “I’m very hopeful.”