Burbank Airport

As usual, your recent editorial rage regarding the Burbank Airport expansion controversy misleads, misinforms and is misdirected against the city of Burbank (“Offer Is Still on the Table,” June 20). The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority took a risk in pushing condemnation of land for the terminal before the legal issue of Burbank’s jurisdiction over the terminal expansion plan was resolved. It’s Judge Carl West’s bizarre 30-day or else court order to the authority to pay up to Lockheed or risk forfeiture of the land that compounds and complexes an already compound and complex issue. Lockheed has been trying to peddle that land for almost 20 years. Why can’t it wait a few more months?

The Burbank City Council shouldn’t bite that legal bait. It is a time for careful deliberation and analysis by Burbank, not panic decision making orchestrated by the court.

TOM PATERSON

Valley Village

* We have read the application for approval of land acquisition given to Burbank by the Airport Authority. To call this an olive branch is an insult to the intelligence of residents of Los Angeles who must live daily with the increasing volume of air traffic and extended hours of flight activity above their homes.

We support the decision of the Burbank mayor and City Council to be deliberate and cautious in their response to this public relations ploy by the Airport Authority. The document offered as a plan for a scaled-down terminal is, upon investigation, more of the same evasions and posturing that have characterized their position for years.

If the authority were really offering an olive branch, it could do any or all of the following: drop the appeal on the public utilities code to the state Supreme Court, open its books and records to Burbank, and drop all claims of prescriptive use noise easements over the homes of the citizens of Burbank, North Hollywood, Valley Village, Studio City and Sherman Oaks. Then we would know it was serious about resolving the airport issue.

LORI DINKIN

President, Valley Village

Homeowners Assn.

* Victor Gill’s comments (Letters to the Valley Edition, June 27) on Linda O’Conner’s June 20 letter are what we have grown to expect from this Airport Authority public affairs director. Through the years, we neighbors affected by the noise and pollution increasingly intrusive in our lives have tried in our humble way to respond to these professional special-interest protectors. O’Conner may have been off a few numbers and may have inadvertently misstated total aircraft flights as airline flights, but total aircraft flights are what we are worried about. Increasing the number of gates now and possibly even more in the future is what we are worried about. Possible transcontinental flight schedules are what we are worried about. If the Airport Authority guarantees that the “future holds 10,000 fewer flights than 20 years ago” and no more than 104 daily airline takeoffs, and if two-thirds of the flights are non-airline activity having nothing to do with the passenger terminal, then why does the authority claim to need more and more gates when the terminal is moved safely away from the runways? If Burbank and Los Angeles are both in litigation with the Airport Authority, maybe there is something more than “pure folly” that Gill has to deal with.

JACK ABRAMS

Valley Village