New Proposal, Old Game

Burbank officials on Tuesday offered a new plan for replacing the old terminal at the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport. The next day, the Airport Authority offered a counterproposal. And so the game of chicken that passes for negotiations in this decades-long contest is back in play.

Stung by criticism of its last effort to negotiate with the airport, Burbank took a tougher stand this time. City officials want to scale back the size of a new terminal, require a mandatory nighttime curfew, change the way noise is measured and establish a “super majority” vote requirement, giving Burbank veto power over the nine-member Airport Authority that governs the airport on behalf of the three cities.

But Burbank officials should have learned by now that there’s no pleasing die-hard airport opponents, who have already attacked the new plan as not restrictive enough. In the meantime, racing headlong into the fray, an airline industry group has denounced the new plan as too restrictive.

There are conditions worth supporting in Burbank’s plan. For one, the city has dropped its request for a continued ban on eastward takeoffs. The request, in last year’s proposed agreement, riled “share the noise” proponents, including a trio of powerful congressmen representing San Fernando Valley residents west of the airport.

Like everything else involving the Burbank Airport, dropping the request will please one side and anger the other. But in reality, it will make very little difference to either. Ban or no ban, pilots prefer the north-south runway because of factors ranging from prevailing winds to the other runway’s proximity to the Verdugo Mountains and traffic from other airports. And pilots, not politicians, should make takeoff decisions.

Also new--and welcome--in Burbank’s recent proposal is a plan for the city to buy property on Hollywood Way to use as a safety buffer. The need for such a buffer was driven home in March when a Southwest Airlines 737 began its descent late and fast and crashed through a barrier at the end of the runway, narrowly missing a gas station.

Why can’t Burbank officials--and the airline industry and community groups--show as much concern for the safety of the terminal itself? Built in the 1930s to serve biplanes, not jets, the existing terminal is too close to the runway to meet today’s safety standards. Yet rather than insisting that the terminal be moved, virtually everyone involved in this war of wills continues to use it as a bargaining chip for hard-to-win curfews, growth caps and noise controls--all of which are important to noise-weary neighbors but none as important as the safety of passengers or those waiting inside the terminal.

The cynics say the safety issue is itself bogus, an excuse to build a bigger terminal and expand airport operations, forcing still more planes, noise and congestion on the airport’s embattled neighbors. But Burbank officials and residents have won that battle. Everyone has agreed that a new terminal, to be built farther from the runway, would have the same number of gates as the old one.

The Airport Authority is willing to go along with a smaller building as well--the two sides are only 25,000 square feet apart at this point--but not on the new noise measurements or a super majority vote. It is willing to go along with a curfew, too, but only the Federal Aviation Administration can approve a curfew and only if a multiyear, multimillion-dollar federal noise study shows that the benefits would outweigh the costs.

In a briefing with Times editors and reporters Tuesday, Burbank officials seemed unusually confident that they would win the FAA’s approval for the curfew. The Airport Authority, while supporting the study, expresses no such confidence. The FAA, as usual, says nothing.

So while all parties continue on their collision course, the clock is ticking on what to do with the land earmarked for the terminal. If Burbank does not exercise an option to buy the land by July 31, the authority can sell it, meaning the land could be used for something else.

Playing chicken is no way to reach a compromise and get this badly needed new terminal built. We all know what happens when neither side swerves.

There are conditions worth supporting in Burbank’s plan, including the dropping of a request for a continued ban on eastward takeoffs.