Employee of people

City Council candidate Margaret Sorthun's Burbank roots go all the way back to the early days of commercial aviation at what is now the Bob Hope Airport.

At 23, she and her then-husband Jim Sorthun co-founded two small charter airlines — Farrair and Admiral Air Service, which flew planes to 11 western states. When the Federal Aviation Administration grounded independent airlines in 1962, she moved into the aircraft sales and parts business and went to work for Lockheed, providing administrative support.

Today, as an aviation retiree of nearly 20 years, 71-year-old Sorthun still threads a daunting mastery of aircraft names and classifications into her conversations. But these days her words tend to dip more often into property-owners' rights issues and city fencing standards than DC-2s and DC-3s.

In March 2005, Sorthun joined the Blue Ribbon Task Force on for Walls, Fences and Hedges — a committee charged with evaluating the City Council's new interim codes, which include a 4-foot-high limitation for frontyard fences.

Almost 10 months into her work on the task force, Sorthun — a staunch proponent of protecting homeowners' rights to do what they want with their properties — has grown frustrated with how she sees committees being formed and operated, she said. The new codes, which the council put in place on an "interim" basis, may as well already be set in stone, she said.

"That's what it comes back to with these committee meetings," she said. "It's simply a formality. But you cannot fool the people anymore — what kind of a right do you have to tell people what they can do with their homes?"

Her disenchantment as a member of the task force partly spurred her bid for a City Council seat, where she is striving to make positive changes in the way the city runs its business, she said.

"I feel that as city government, we're employees of the people," she said. "They're the employer and we just have to do the job satisfactory to their liking."

Sorthun's eagerness to reach out to those around her is well known among her friends and acquaintances, said Jesse Davis, who has known her for more than 40 years.

As a council person, Sorthun would bring a sharp investigative capacity and solid decision-making abilities to the council, he added.

"She'd be a fantastic councilperson because she knows how to do research and she gets to the bottom of things," he said.