CHRISTOPHER WOODARD
Staff Reporter
Welcome to Burbank Airport, one of the nation’s oldest, most outdated facilities.
The 14-gate, 69-year-old terminal is designed for about a third of the passengers it handles. It lacks the most basic of services, including walkways that connect planes to the terminal building. It also is woefully short of the shops, restaurants and snack bars that are an accepted part of newer airports all over the world.
It’s even short of chairs.
“When you come down here and have to sit on the floor when there’s no place to sit, that’s an inconvenience the public should not have to endure,” said Sean McCarthy, an airport spokesman.
“Or when toilets back up,” he continues, “or when you have old smelly diesel generators on the field because you have no direct electrical lines to plug the aircraft into, or you have cars stacking up in front of the terminal because there isn’t a decent passenger drop off area. Those are the kinds of things people want.”
That’s probably true. But a funny thing has happened amid the long-running political turmoil over an expanded facility: The number of passengers is leveling off. Actually, passenger traffic between 1995 and 1998, one of the area’s most prosperous economic periods, actually declined from 4.9 million to 4.7 million, while the number of air carriers remained constant.
“John Wayne Airport has 14 gates, and it handles 8 million passengers a year, with flight restrictions,” said Burbank City Manager Bud Ovrom. “Theoretically, Burbank Airport can continue to operate for a long time to come. If you go to the terminal, is it crowded? Yeah, that happens. But it hasn’t become so bad that it becomes dysfunctional,” he said. “It operates just fine.”
The views of Ovrom and McCarthy illustrate why airport expansion has been such a political and legal battle for so many years. What’s considered intolerable by one side is viewed as satisfactory by the other.
In fact, both sides are right sort of.
Among the airport’s pluses:
A business person can book a flight at Burbank Airport in the morning, fly to a meeting in Northern California and return in time to see his kid play in a Little League game that afternoon. It’s also possible to fly to Dallas or Chicago or Seattle without traversing the San Diego Freeway en route to LAX. Parking tends to be easier and the airport entrance runs just a few hundred yards. The runways are extremely close to the terminal, thus providing for minimal taxiing delays, and they have been deemed safe by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Among the minuses:
Non-stop service remains unavailable to the East Coast. The Airport Authority and the FAA generally agree that the terminal is too close to the runway. Service pretty much shuts down late in the evening and the airlines have minimal facilities to handle the crush of passengers that descend in the early-morning and late-afternoon hours. Fridays are especially bad.
But not bad enough to cause a firestorm of protest or to push the city of Burbank to fully endorse airport expansion.
“If you look back over history, something has to go terribly wrong in this country before people react to it,” said Victor Gil, the airport’s public affairs director. “In this case, no one’s ox is being gored. Even we have to ask ourselves sometimes who really cares.”
The Airport Authority, the agency that runs the airport, wants a new, and preferably larger, terminal. Burbank intends to block the terminal indefinitely unless the city wins a ban on night flights, a concession that federal regulators and the powerful airline industry aren’t likely to give.
The legal battle has resulted in a total of nine lawsuits being filed by both sides. Things seemed to be going in favor of Burbank last month, when the state Court of Appeals ruled that the city has the right to block expansion under an obscure California Public Utilities code section designed to give cities more planning control over airports.
But a week later, the FAA handed the city a serious setback when it refused to grant Burbank’s request to have the airport exempted from a federal law that makes it nearly impossible to impose flight restrictions at commercial airports.
The Airport Authority has now offered Burbank an olive branch by agreeing to reduce the size of the air terminal from 19 to 16 gates. But the city intends to press its case for a mandatory curfew on night flights.
Burbank is also expected to demand traffic improvements before allowing a new terminal to go forward. That could mean asking the airport to pay the $30 million to $50 million cost of building a connector between the Glendale (134) and the Golden State (5) freeways, an improvement Ovrom said is needed to relieve airport-related traffic on residential streets.
“This is like a legal Lebanon,” Neil Bennett, director of the Western region of the Air Transport Association, said of the ongoing legal saga. “You hear things like that (the potential demand for a freeway connector) and you have to wonder if (the city) wants a new terminal at all.”
Ovrom said the city does indeed want a new air terminal, but not if the community has to give up control over noise and traffic that a new facility would generate.
Burbank City Councilman Bob Kramer said the issue is of huge importance to residents who live nearby. “Burbank is a prosperous city. We have enough money to fund continuous litigation if we have to,” he said.
Kramer and other Burbank officials are heartened by a recent shift in the political dynamic. Glendale voters recently elected members to the City Council who are more sympathetic to the concerns of neighboring Burbank. In addition, Thomas Greer, the authority’s executive director and strident supporter of the new terminal, recently announced he was leaving the post. The move has been interpreted by some as the removal of an obstacle to compromise.
While McCarthy concedes that the airport is getting by these days, the real crunch will take place in 15 or 20 years when the area’s population takes off. What’s going to happen, he asks, if LAX isn’t able to expand or a new facility at El Toro falls through?
“Burbank Airport is going to have 15 million passengers a year, only there will be no place to put them,” he said. “Will we have porta-potties and loading ramps in the parking lot? This is the direction we’re going if we don’t get a new terminal.”
Still, Kramer concedes that the traveling public “probably could care less” about the flap.
And Gill said in the grand scheme of things, the battle over the new terminal isn’t even on the radar screen of the FAA or the airlines. In fact, both sides had a chance to join the authority in a federal lawsuit to force the city to allow the new terminal to go forward, but they both declined.
The Airport Authority board will have to come to grips with the uncertainties when it decides whether to complete the $86 million acquisition of 120 acres of Lockheed Martin Corp. land needed for the new terminal.
“The authority (board) is faced by a real conundrum. Do I put up (millions) of dollars for property Burbank can tell me I can’t use?” said Gill. “If you asked them right now, I’m not sure they could answer yes.”
