Stalling Leaves Few Choices

The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority on Friday withdrew--at least for now--its application to build a new airport terminal. It’s really no surprise, considering.

Earlier in the week the Burbank City Council said it would not consider the application before completing a new environmental impact report. The city claimed the 1993 EIR was out of date.

It’s true that the terminal design had changed since the Airport Authority first applied to replace its 1930s-era terminal. (Talk about out of date.)

The thing is, the size of the proposed new terminal had gotten smaller. The number of new gates had gone from 19 to 14, the same number as the current terminal. The size of the building itself had been slashed from 330,000 square feet to 250,000.

It’s hard to see how this scaled-down application--changed at Burbank’s request--would have more of an impact than the earlier, larger version.

And it’s a little too convenient for Burbank to object and delay and stall and then charge that the reports undergirding the application are out of date.

This has been Burbank’s pattern for years, except for one brave attempt in 1999 to negotiate an agreement on a new terminal everyone could live with.

When that agreement fell through, the city went back to its old ways. It declined its option to buy the former Lockheed B-6 property earmarked for the terminal, setting in motion a requirement that the Airport Authority put the land up for sale. Any delay only increases the chances that the property won’t be available for a new terminal.

But delay is all Burbank does. Council members may say they want to build a new terminal, but their actions say otherwise, as their latest roadblock showed.

The Airport Authority said it withdrew its application for the terminal in part so that the city would not link it to--and thus delay--a separate application to improve runway safety. It is incomprehensible that the city needs any prodding to make safety a priority after a Southwest Airlines 737 last March skidded off the runway, broke through safety barriers and came to rest near a gas station on Hollywood Way.

The Airport Authority should abandon plans to build a terminal on the B-6 property, as ideal as the location is, and go with an alternative site that it already owns and is zoned for airport use. The city of Burbank leaves it little choice.