Paul Clinton and Darrell Satzman
CIVIC CENTER -- City officials said they will return to the
negotiating table to craft a new deal for a terminal at Burbank Airport.
That deak would abandon the idea of a terminal closure or a ban on
easterly takeoffs, but would almost certainly require a mandatory
nighttime flight curfew before construction begins.
The announcement came in response to a March 24 letter from Federal
Aviation Administration Chief Administrator Jane Garvey in which she laid
out her most specific objections yet to the proposed Framework for
Settlement deal between the city and the Burbank-Glendale-Pasadena
Airport Authority. The letter, which was released at Tuesday's City
Council meeting, fell well short of the commitment of support the city
had been seeking from the FAA for the deal and convinced officials to
begin work on a new development agreement.
"It's clear we need to move on to chapter two," Councilman Dave
Golonski said. "I think everything is open and we'll have to go back and
examine what we've learned over the last six months."
Airport and city officials had crafted a rough draft of the
development agreement for the terminal in the framework deal -- a
14-gate, 330,000-square-foot building that could be expanded under
certain conditions. About half of that document will need to be revised,
said Peter Kirsch, Burbank's attorney on airport issues.
Kirsch and others said the framework deal will be used as a starting
point for future talks with the FAA and other affected parties but stood
no chance of being approved in its current form.
"I wouldn't characterize it as tearing it up and starting over," City
Manager Bud Ovrom said. "We need to move on to a modified version of it."
In February, Mayor Stacey Murphy announced the city was stopping talks
on a new terminal because of the FAA's unwillingness to spell out what it
objected to in the framework deal. Garvey's most recent letter, in which
she expressed a desire to continue working with the city and the airport,
did broach some specific issues but was not clear enough, city officials
said. What was clear, they said, was the importance of FAA support.
"Whatever happens is going to have to have FAA approvals," Ovrom said.
Among her objections to the deal, Garvey resisted the terminal
closure, a provision the airlines had labeled a de facto curfew. Under
federal law, airports can only secure a curfew through a Part 161 study,
a comprehensive application to the FAA for noise-control measures.
