Tuesday Rundown: Burbank Airport to Sell 59 Acres; United’s LAX Flights Head to Newark; SolarCity to Open Atwater Village Ops Center

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The Burbank Bob Hope Airport on Tuesday put a 59-acre parcel of airport-adjacent land on the market for commercial and office development.

The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority is working with real estate broker CBRE Group Inc. to find a buyer for the property. The new owner will have to work with Burbank on planning uses for the land.

The airport authority acquired the land, part of a 108-acre parcel previously owned by Lockheed Corp., in 1999. The authority set aside 49 acres to use for a new terminal building and placed the remaining 59 acres into a trust until it was decided what to do with it.

The authority and the city of Burbank had agreed the 59 acres would be sold off if the two sides did not come to an agreement by March on how to develop the property.

The land is one of the largest available transit-oriented development sites in Southern California. It is close to Metrolink and Amtrak stations, buses operated by the L.A. County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, BurbankBus, the proposed California High Speed Rail route and multiple freeways.

“The authority is confident that CBRE will do an excellent job of marketing this property and that it will draw considerable interest in the coming months,” said Authority President Steve Madison in a prepared statement.

The authority, meanwhile, is still pursuing a new terminal on the 49 acres it owns. The terminal would be capped at 14 gates and its size restricted to no larger than 355,000 square feet.

LAX-JFK? Not on United

Los Angeles and San Francisco travelers flying United Airlines will no longer be able to fly directly into New York.

The Chicago airline announced Tuesday that it would be stopping service out of John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens in October and shifting all West Coast flights to Newark Liberty International Airport.

United said it hasn’t made a profit at JFK for seven years because it offered passengers fewer connections to other cities. The airline sold its JFK slots to Delta Air Lines in exchange for purchasing Delta’s Newark slots, pending regulatory approval.

SolarCity to Open Operations Center in Atwater Village

SolarCity, the dominant U.S. installer of residential solar panels, is opening a new 20,000-square-foot operations center in Los Angeles.

The company plans to cut the ribbon at the Atwater Village facility on Wednesday during an event to be attended by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and Solar City Chief Executive Lyndon Rive. Rive is the cousin of Los Angeles billionaire Elon Musk, who is Solar City’s chairman biggest shareholder.

The company expects to hire about 80 employees at the new center, located on West San Fernando Road, just across the Los Angeles River from the L.A. Zoo. Solar City already employs nearly 300 people in the city and more than 2,000 in Southern California, according to company officials.

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