Airport Appeals Decision to Expand City’s Power

In an attempt to buy time, lawyers for Burbank Airport on Monday appealed a May 5 appellate court decision that gave the city of Burbank expanded power over the airport’s long-standing plans to expand the terminal.

Victor Gill, spokesman for the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority, said the appeal to the state Supreme Court was made because the appellate court decision could trigger complications in the purchase of land for airport expansion.

In order to expand, the Airport Authority went to court to acquire land from Lockheed Martin Corp. A jury last week set the price the authority should pay for 130 acres at $86 million.

“Right now, there’s a risk in the condemnation [land sale] case that the judge would read a finalization of the Burbank case as denying him the ability to move the sale of the land forward,” Gill said.

At an earlier court hearing in the land-sale case, Superior Court Judge Carl West “said very explicitly that if there were a final judgment in the [Burbank land use review] case, he did not see how he could convey title for the Lockheed land to the Airport Authority,” Gill said.

The appeal was filed to keep the land-use decision from becoming final, he said.

The airport is controlled by representatives of all three cities. Burbank has for years fought the airport, contending it wanted to build too large a terminal that would negatively affect neighbors. Recently, the Airport Authority offered scaled back expansion plans as a compromise.

Philip Berlin, one of Burbank’s representatives on the Airport Authority, questioned the need to appeal, saying he disagreed with the reasons stated for filing it.

Berlin also expressed concern that the decision to appeal was made by outside counsel and not by the full nine-member board of the authority.

Berlin said the attorney, Richard Simon, was given broad powers in 1996 to make decisions in the legal proceedings surrounding the authority’s controversial attempt to expand the airport.

“The dynamics of this dispute were considerably different then than they are today,” said Berlin. The appeal “doesn’t help the process,” he said.

“Appealing this decision is a policy matter, and it’s a matter that the full [airport] authority should have decided one way or another,” he said.

In a news release, authority president Joyce Streator, who agreed with the decision to appeal, said that whatever the outcome of the appeal, the authority would stand by all elements of its recent compromise proposal to Burbank, including the offer to downsize the airport.

Berlin said the matter is expected to come before the authority at its meeting Thursday.