Council May Put Burbank Airport Issue on Ballot

BURBANK — The City Council will consider letting city voters decide on a proposed $300-million airport terminal after an initiative on the terminal issue was disqualified from the ballot.

The initiative would have forced voter approval of any new Burbank Airport terminal exceeding 200,000 square feet. Airport officials want to build a 330,000-square-foot terminal to meet passenger demand.

The measure was disqualified Wednesday by City Clerk Judie Sarquiz, who said the signed petitions did not include the names of the measure’s chief proponents, former City Councilman Ted McConkey and Howard Rothenbach, as required by state law.

Burbank Mayor Stacey Murphy and Councilman Bob Kramer said they would ask the City Council on Tuesday to use its authority to put the measure on the ballot anyway.

Murphy and Kramer said it was unfair to torpedo the initiative on what Murphy called a technicality.

“The only thing we accomplish by not putting it on the ballot is making them collect the signatures, which they will be successful doing,” Murphy said. “They made one mistake, and I don’t think they should have to be made to start all over again.”

The initiative was circulated by a group called Restore Our Airport Rights, or ROAR, which says the larger terminal will mean more flights and thus more noise to residents.

Kramer said he would ask the council to put the ROAR measure on the municipal ballot.

Kramer, who also authored a pending measure for an advisory vote on the airport terminal plan, said he was in favor of ROAR’s initiative.

“Too many people signed that initiative to turn it away because of a minor glitch,” he said.

Councilman David Laurell said he was ambivalent about the proposal.

“More people signed the initiative than elected me to office, so I have to have great respect for their voice being heard and would be willing to put it before the people,” he said. “But I also have great concern about its constitutionality and opening the city up to lawsuits.”

Murphy said she did not know whether she would favor a special election or have it appear on the next municipal ballot in February.

ROAR claimed Tuesday that it submitted 7,400 signatures to the city clerk for the measure, which in addition to size limits would have included a mandatory curfew and caps on flights.

Members could not be reached for comment. But the group has said its initiative was designed to kill a tentative agreement for a 330,000-square-foot, 14-gate terminal to replace the existing 170,000-square-foot facility.

*

The deal, negotiated by the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority and city officials last year, must still be approved by the Burbank City Council.

A spokeswoman for the Air Transport Assn., an airline industry group, said the issue should not be decided by a ballot measure.

“We are willing to sit down and discuss the issues with Burbank in good faith,” said Chris Leathers, director of government affairs for the Air Transport Assn. “But we cannot negotiate away issues like a mandatory curfew, and any effort to place arbitrary limits on capacity and future growth at the airport. That’s clearly what this initiative is trying to do.”

Burbank Airport officials refused comment on the latest twist in the fight over the terminal.

“We’re staying out of Burbank politics,” said Victor Gill, spokesman for the Airport Authority. “We didn’t comment on the initiative going in; we won’t comment [on it] going out.”

The existing terminal is 313 feet from the center of the east-west runway. Modern Federal Aviation Administration standards call for terminals to be at least 750 feet away.

The FAA in 1980 recommended that the Burbank terminal be moved. But construction plans stalled for years as Burbank officials sided with neighbors worried that a new terminal would lead to more flights and noise.

Last summer, the frosty relations between the airport and city began to thaw. City and airport negotiators in August signed off on a tentative deal to build a new terminal.

City and airport officials said they had the residents in mind when they sought to close the terminal between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., link expansion to as many as 19 gates to a mandatory curfew, use $1.5 million a year in passenger fees to offset lost property taxes and permanently ban easterly takeoffs.

That was not enough, as the plan drew widespread criticism from not only residents but the airlines, Los Angeles political leaders and the FAA.