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FAA Study for Burbank Is Just Noise

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Dave Golonski is mayor and Stacey Murphy vice mayor of the city of Burbank

The city of Burbank is being urged to support a major expansion of the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport in return for the Airport Authority’s willingness to pursue a Federal Aviation Administration Part 161 study, a process by which the FAA would consider and possibly grant Burbank’s desired noise mitigation measures such as a mandatory curfew and noise budget.

The problem with the suggestion lies in the distinction between merely pursuing noise relief for our residents and actually achieving noise relief.

As members of the Burbank City Council, we are charged with the responsibility of maintaining the quality of life of our residents. We feel that supporting the expansion of the airport based on the authority’s willingness to pursue an uncertain process would be reckless at best and would involve a serious breach of those responsibilities. In addition, such an agreement would completely eliminate the motivation for the authority and the FAA to work with the city of Burbank to ensure that an expanded airport will not decimate the quality of life of those who live in the surrounding neighborhoods.

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No serious public agency would ever approve a project of this magnitude not knowing what the impacts would be and what measures would be in place to mitigate those impacts. Everyone intuitively knows that an expanded airport will bring increased noise as well as other impacts.

The real question concerns the potential magnitude of those impacts. We don’t know if there will be planes regularly taking off and landing around the clock, or if there will be a 10% or 100% increase in noise. These are legitimate questions that must be answered with a degree of certainty that the surrounding residents can accept.

The Airport Authority wants the city of Burbank to agree, in advance, to live with the results of the Part 161 study. While this request is, on its face, unacceptable, we think it is important to put our opposition into context.

If presented with a major development that needed approval from Caltrans for a new freeway onramp to prevent gridlock, neither the city of Glendale nor the city of Pasadena would ever consider approval of the project based solely on the promise of the developer to seek such approval. Any city would require the proponents of such a project to obtain approval for the necessary mitigation before the project was allowed to proceed, especially when that approval could be uncertain.

This situation is no different, with the possible exception that the FAA has already indicated an astonishing level of agreement with the Airport Authority that the expanded terminal project will not result in any significant increased noise impact.

While their position seems to contradict common sense, it does give one a better understanding of our skepticism when we are asked to compromise our requests for concrete enforceable noise limits in return for “good faith” efforts and pursuit of processes with uncertain outcomes.

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One of the complaints often expressed by the authority relates to the amount of time that the Part 161 process takes to complete. What they do not mention is that they voted to initiate a Part 161 study in November 1995 and never took action to begin the study. It’s a shame they did not seriously pursue this process in 1995.

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The authority’s inaction notwithstanding, we have offered to help fund up to $250,000 of the Part 161 study in exchange for our participation in the process as equal partners in order to expedite the process and to help increase the likelihood of a successful outcome.

Frankly, the short- and long-term consequences of this issue are far too important to our community for the Burbank City Council to be anything less than diligent in our efforts to guarantee that the necessary mitigation measures are real and meaningful before we can lend our support to an expansion project of this magnitude.

Our residents would undoubtedly throw us out of office on our ear if we were to cavalierly bargain away their quality-of-life concerns, and they would be completely justified in doing so. We place great value on the quality of life in Burbank, and we believe the price the Airport Authority is asking our residents to pay is unacceptable.

At the heart of this dispute is that the Airport Authority wants to build a terminal expansion project without concern for its potential effects on the surrounding communities. We believe the dispute will be resolved if and only if the authority gets serious about meeting the legitimate needs of the many areas that will be affected by their expansion ambitions.

We believe there has been some real progress on that front in recent weeks, and we remain hopeful that the parties to this dispute will be able to work together and come up with a comprehensive package that includes a mandatory curfew and other noise limits along with a new modern terminal for this airport.

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If the Airport Authority is either unable or unwilling to obtain the noise-mitigation measures that will protect the surrounding residents’ quality of life, we would suggest they rethink their desires for expansion and seriously consider a relocated replacement terminal similar in size and capacity to the existing 14-gate terminal facility.

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