Safety First, Not Politics

The Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena Airport Authority last week proposed ways to head off disaster should a plane overshoot the runway, as happened last March. That no one was seriously injured then seemed a miracle. A Southwest Airlines 737 began its descent late and fast and crashed through a barrier, skidding to a stop on busy Hollywood Way and narrowly missing a gas station.

Airport officials want to install a special paving material that would stop or slow planes, move some parking lots farther from the runway and acquire and demolish the gas station. The city of Burbank should do all it can to expedite the airport’s application to buy the properties and relocate the parking lots. Safety should not depend on miracles.

But for the city to move quickly on this may require something of a miracle itself.

Burbank officials in July made establishing a safety buffer one of their conditions for allowing the Airport Authority to build a new terminal. But talks broke down and the Burbank City Council has seemed in no hurry since to consider any airport proposal.

This is particularly disappointing because just last year the two sides, after decades of disagreement, reached a breakthrough accord on building the badly needed new terminal. Unfortunately, around the same time the plane skidded off the Burbank runway, the Federal Aviation Administration nixed a key provision in the framework plan. The FAA said that the airport would have to undertake a lengthy federal noise study before imposing a mandatory curfew, a requirement the agreement tried to skirt by simply shutting down the terminal at night.

The Airport Authority has begun the study. But instead of trying to salvage the framework plan, the Burbank City Council made new demands for an even smaller terminal and for growth caps and noise controls. And, stung by criticism from die-hard airport opponents for negotiating at all, council members put an initiative on last month’s ballot amending the Municipal Code to require voter approval of any agreement to expand or relocate the terminal. The measure passed.

Which brings us to the stick offered last week by the Airport Authority along with the carrot of runway safety buffers.

The authority floated the idea of building a new terminal on land already owned by the airport rather than on the former Lockheed Martin site proposed in the earlier agreement. Airport officials suggested the alternative site in part because they are required, at Burbank’s insistence, to put the Lockheed Martin land on the market now that the agreement has fallen apart. The Airport Authority says it can’t count on reaching a new agreement with Burbank officials in time to stop a sale.

The Airport Authority claims that building a terminal on the alternative parcel would require less city oversight because that land, unlike the Lockheed site, is already designated for airport use. In other words, the city would have much less leverage than it has now--which the Airport Authority hopes will prod Burbank to reconsider the Lockheed proposal.

The larger Lockheed Martin site is the better location; it allows more design flexibility and easier access and would put the terminal a generous distance from the runways. (The existing terminal is too close to meet modern safety standards.) But Burbank officials, who are not above using the impending Lockheed sale to pressure the airport for concessions, refuse to be pressured in turn. “If they’re thinking that they can circumvent all the city’s concerns and powers with their new application because it’s on land that they already own, they’re in for a long fight,” Burbank Mayor Bill Wiggins told The Times.

With a primary election only months away, it seems unlikely that the airport-averse City Council is going to be looking for a way out of this stalemate, much less taking as courageous a stand as it did last year when it forged the framework agreement.

But surely it risks nothing by agreeing to runway safety buffers. To relegate this proposal to the same endless holding pattern as the terminal--or worse, to make it a bargaining chip as well--would once again emphasize the shamefully small role safety plays in this debate.